Michelle Trachtenberg, ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Buffy’ actress, passes away at 39

Michelle Trachtenberg, a touchstone of millennial youth culture who grew up on-screen, 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 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 am on Wednesday, found 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.

Trachtenberg established her long-standing 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 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 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.”

Michelle Christine Trachtenberg was born Oct. 11, 1985, in New York City, the younger of two daughters of Michael and Lana Trachtenberg. Her father was a fiber-optics technician from Germany; her mother, a bank manager from Russia.

Growing up in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn, she was encouraged by her parents to pursue her early screen dreams; her career began with a series of television commercials when she was a child, which eventually led to meatier roles. Her family moved to Los Angeles, where she attended Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks and was within striking range of Hollywood.

Following “Buffy,” Trachtenberg had grown beyond child-star status and began to find herself sexualized in films like 2004 teenage sex comedy “EuroTrip.” “There’s a scene at a nude beach, and in a certain shot the bottom of one of my … things started to fall out,” she said in 2004 interview with The Daily News of New York. “The filmmakers said, ‘Oh, we won’t use that, don’t worry.’”

“Yeah, right,” she added. “Guess which shot they used?”

In a 2012 interview with Complex magazine, she recalled a scene in the 2006 film Beautiful Ohio, starring William Hurt and Rita Wilson, that featured her “naked tush.” It was, she said, “probably one of the most horrendous moments of my life.”

“It would take an army — or Martin Scorsese — to ever get me naked again,” she added.

She took a more wholesome turn in 2005 when she played a science-geek-turned-figure-skater in Ice Princess. “I trained for eight months for the movie,” she said in an interview that year with The Early Show on CBS. “My big favorite move to do is the outside edge spread eagle, which I worked really hard on and came close to perfecting it many times, and finally, one day, it hit.”

In 2008, she added another career-defining role, joining the cast of “Gossip Girl,” the popular CW drama about the privileged lives of moneyed and misbehaving private school students on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as the scheming Georgina Sparks.

“I’m the new bitch in town,” she said in an interview that year with The Sunday Telegraph newspaper of Britain, “and I’m going to make my presence known.”

After that series ended in 2012, Trachtenberg popped up in other television series, including NCIS: Los Angeles, and starred in the television movies Killing Kennedy (in which she played Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife) in 2013, The Christmas Gift in 2015, and Sister Cities in 2016. She also played a high school guidance counselor investigating a scandal involving a popular girl on campus in the web series Guidance, which debuted in 2015.

Information about survivors was not immediately available.

Despite dealing with the pressures of stardom from an early age, Trachtenberg told Complex that she managed to steer clear of the pitfalls of early fame — including drugs. “My mom was protective,” she recalled. “But she just said, ‘It’s your choice — you ruin your career or don’t.’ If you realize how lucky you are to be sitting in the position you are, then you just don’t drink, don’t do the cocaine.”