'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Star Dies
by EG
Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn Summers in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died at age 39. Her cause of death has not yet been determined, but reports say that she had recently undergone a liver transplant. Read on for details.
Via Variety.
Michelle Trachtenberg, the actor best known for film and television roles including “Gossip Girl” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” has died. She was 39.
She was found unconscious and unresponsive Wednesday in her Manhattan apartment, according to the New York City police department. According to the New York Post, which first reported the news, she had recently undergone a liver transplant. Trachtenberg’s cause of death has not been confirmed, but the NYPD said criminality was not suspected.
In a statement, NYPD said that officers responded to a 911 call just after 8 a.m. and Trachtenberg was pronounced dead by emergency medical workers, who also responded to the scene.
“It is with great sadness to confirm that Michelle Trachtenberg has passed away,” her publicist Gary Mantoosh said in a statement. “The family requests privacy for their loss. There are no further details at this time.”
Born in New York on Oct. 11, 1985, Trachtenberg began acting at a young age. She was 3 years old when she began appearing in commercials and soon after landed her first TV credit, on the Nickelodeon series “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” which aired in the mid 1990s. By age 10, she scored her first starring film role in 1996’s “Harriet the Spy,” in which she played the eponymous aspiring sleuth opposite Rosie O’Donnell and J. Smith-Cameron.
Trachtenberg’s breakthrough, however, was playing Dawn Summers on the teen drama “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which ran on the WB in the early aughts. Trachtenberg joined the popular show in its fifth season as the younger sister of Sarah Michelle Geller’s Buffy Summers and remained on the series through its seventh and final season in 2003.
She found further success on another teen drama, portraying the agent of chaos known as Georgina Sparks on “Gossip Girl,” which ran from 2007 to 2012. Trachtenberg’s character, a diabolical Manhattan socialite, regularly found herself feuding, or blackmailing, with Blake Lively’s Serena van der Woodsen and Leighton Meester’s Blair Waldorf. She briefly reprised her role on HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot in 2022.
Get the rest of the story at Variety.