Gossip Girl actress Michelle Trachtenberg, dies at age 39

Michelle Trachtenberg, the actor best known for film and television roles including “Gossip Girl” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” has died at the age of 39. 

Trachtenberg was found by her mother at around 8 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 26, at One Columbus Place, a 51-story luxury apartment complex in Manhattan’s Central Park South neighborhood, sources told New York Post. 

The actress recently underwent a liver transplant, according to the sources. 

Her cause of de@th has not been confirmed. 

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, 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, portraying the mean girl Georgina Sparks on “Gossip Girl,” which ran 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”.