Michelle Trachtenberg passes away at the age of 39
Actress Michelle Trachtenberg, best known for her film and television roles in “Gossip Girl” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” has passed away at the age of 39.
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Trachtenberg was reportedly found de@d by her mother at around 8 a.m. Wednesday, February. 26th, 2025, at One Columbus Place, a 51-story luxury apartment complex in Manhattan’s Central Park South neighborhood.
The actress recently underwent a liver transplant, according to the sources.
Her cause of de@th has not been confirmed.
Trachtenberg was born on October 11th, 1985, in New York City, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, her father from Germany and her mother from Russia. She learned to speak Russian from her mother.
She was raised with an older sister, Irene, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where she attended junior high school at The Bay Academy for the Arts and Sciences.
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, J. Smith-Cameron.
Her breakthrough, however, was playing Dawn Summers on the teen drama “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. 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 until it ended with season seven in 2003.
She found further success in another teen drama, “Gossip Girl,” from 2007 to 2012.
During the mid-2000s, Trachtenberg also starred in films such as 2004’s “Eurotrip,” the raunchy teen comedy that popularized the fictional song “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” and 2005’s “Ice Princess”.
