‘Gossip Girl’ star Michelle Trachtenberg dies at 39

Los Angeles:  “Gossip Girl” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” actress Michelle Trachtenberg has died aged 39.

According to the New York City police department, the actress was found unconscious and unresponsive Wednesday in her Manhattan apartment, reports variety.com.

According to the New York Post, she had recently undergone a liver transplant. Trachtenberg’s cause of death has not been confirmed, but the New York Police Department (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. The family requests privacy for their loss. There are no further details at this time,” publicist Gary Mantoosh said in a statement.

Born in New York in 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”. 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. Her character, a diabolical Manhattan socialite, regularly found herself feuding, or blackmailing, with Blake Lively’s role Serena van der Woodsen and Leighton Meester’s Blair Waldorf.

She briefly reprised her role in the “Gossip Girl” reboot in 2022.

Trachtenberg has a long list of genre-spanning credits on the big and small screen. Her film roles include 2004’s “Eurotrip,” the raunchy teen comedy that popularized the fictional song “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” and 2005’s “Ice Princess,” a comparatively wholesome film about a nerdy high schooler with a passion for figure skating.

She also starred in 2009’s “17 Again” with Zac Efron and Matthew Perry as well as episodes of TV shows such as “Law & Order,” “Clarissa Explains It All,” “All My Children,” “Six Feet Under” and “Weeds.”

–IANS