Michelle Trachtenberg, a touchstone of millennial youth culture who grew up onscreen, rising to fame as a troubled teenager on the supernatural 1990s series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and as a conniving young socialite on “Gossip Girl,” was found dead on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 39.
The New York Police Department said in a statement that officers, responding to a 911 call just after 8 a.m. on Wednesday, found Ms. Trachtenberg unconscious and unresponsive in a Manhattan apartment. She was pronounced dead by emergency medical workers, who had also responded.
The department said that the medical examiner would determine the cause of death, but added that criminal activity was not suspected.
Ms. Trachtenberg established her longstanding presence on the small screen at the age of 3, when she appeared in a television commercial for Wisk laundry detergent in which she spilled cranberry juice.
Before she was 10, she was making regular appearances on the Nickelodeon sitcom “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” as well as appearing on the enduring ABC daytime drama “All My Children.”
Her breakout came at 11, when she made her big-screen debut in the title role of “Harriet the Spy” (1996), the film adaptation of Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 children’s book, which also featured Rosie O’Donnell as Harriet’s nanny, Ole Golly.
She drew praise for her performance as Harriet Welsch, a precocious girl who draws scorn from schoolmates over her imagined spy adventures, which she meticulously chronicles in a notebook.
Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that Ms. Trachtenberg “gives a performance that is as endearing as it is devoid of self-conscious cuteness,” adding, “Her Harriet is high-spirited and stubborn, but never unlikable.”
She found a new level of fame as a teenager in 2000, when she joined the cast of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” during its fifth season, as the younger sister of the mystically powered Buffy Summers, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, a longtime friend who knew Ms. Trachtenberg from their days on “All My Children.”
Her character, plagued with adolescent angst and bouts of kleptomania, inspired pushback from some fans. “I still get comments like, ‘Oh my God! I think Dawn is so annoying!,’” she said in a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly. She added that she got “a lot of ‘Oh, she was so whiny! Hi, were you a teenager? Oh, you were docile, sitting in the corner, doe-eyed and happy to be there? No. There’s a reason why teenagers have a stigma.”
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