Michelle Trachtenberg

Her character, Dawn, had emerged from nowhere, though the implication was that she was the younger teen sister of the show’s heroine, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy Summers, and that she’d been there all along. Suddenly there she was, eager to be accepted by her older, cooler sister and that sister’s older, cooler friends. She was an interloper. She was annoying. Viewers wanted her to just go away.
But Trachtenberg’s Dawn was so adorably awkward, so meltingly vulnerable, that it wasn’t long before the show’s fans embraced her. If you were Dawn’s age, you related to her; if you were older, you felt protective of her. Trachtenberg, who died on Feb. 26 at age 39, was a stealthy charmer. Her presence in early-2000s TV—later, she would play the scheming socialite Georgina Sparks on Gossip Girl—exemplifies the hold that even secondary characters can have on us. You don’t have to be the star of the show to earn viewers’ affection and loyalty, as Trachtenberg did.
She started her career doing TV commercials at age 3. At 10, she made her film debut in Harriet the Spy (1996). Post-Buffy, she played supporting roles in films like Mysterious Skin (2004) and Cop Out (2010), though her finest hour in the movie realm may be as the swe...