RIP Daveigh Chase: She was Lilo, Chihiro, and Samara before she turned 13
The actress who died this week at 35 packed an astonishing range into her childhood, voicing two of the most beloved animated heroines ever and playing one of horror’s scariest kids, often in the same stretch of months.
Most actors would build a whole career around any one of Daveigh Chase’s roles. She did three of the biggest before she was a teenager, and they could not have been more different from one another.
The year Daveigh Chase was everywhere
In a roughly twelve-month span around 2002, a kid from Albany, Oregon was simultaneously the warm heart of a Disney movie, the lead of an Oscar-winning Japanese masterpiece’s English dub, and the thing crawling out of your television to kill you.
From Chihiro to Lilo, a voice a generation grew up with
Chase voiced Lilo Pelekai in Lilo & Stitch, the lonely Hawaiian girl who adopts a destructive blue alien and refuses to give up on him. She stayed with the character across Stitch! The Movie, the TV series, and Leroy & Stitch.
Around the same time, she was Chihiro in the English dub of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s film that went on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Two of the most cherished animated girls in modern film, a Disney one and a Ghibli one, came out of the same young actress within months of each other.
Her path there started early. She was doing community shows in Oregon at three, shot a Campbell’s Soup commercial at seven, and auditioned for Lilo at eight. Steven Spielberg even handpicked her to sing “God Bless America” in 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
Samara Morgan and an MTV award over Daniel Day-Lewis
Then there’s the role that made a generation afraid of their own TVs.
In 2002’s The Ring, Chase played Samara Morgan, the drowned girl whose cursed videotape kills you seven days after you watch it. The image of her crawling out of the screen, hair over her face, became one of the most parodied and imitated horror visuals of the century.
It won her the 2003 MTV Movie Award for Best Villain, beating a field that included Mike Myers, Colin Farrell, Willem Dafoe, and Daniel Day-Lewis. A 12-year-old took home the trophy over an eventual three-time Oscar winner.
She’d already shown that range a year earlier as Samantha Darko, Jake Gyllenhaal’s little sister in the cult classic Donnie Darko, a role she’d reprise as an adult.
Big Love and a long step away from Hollywood
Chase’s longest-running gig came on the other side of childhood.
From 2006 to 2011 she played Rhonda Volmer across 32 episodes of HBO’s Big Love, the polygamy drama with Bill Paxton, Chloë Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin. She also turned up on ER, Charmed, CSI, and Touched by an Angel along the way.
Her last credited role came in the 2016 film American Romance. She largely stepped away from acting after that and kept a low profile for the better part of a decade.
What’s known about Daveigh Chase’s death
The details, for now, come mostly from one person.
Her boyfriend, Roy Hernandez, told TMZ that Chase died on Tuesday, June 16, from meningitis and a blood infection that turned septic and led to organ failure. The Los Angeles County coroner has not yet released an official cause of death.
Hernandez said she had been hospitalized in Los Angeles earlier in the month, reported to be for malnutrition. In a GoFundMe he started before she died, he wrote about the hardship she’d carried for years, describing a difficult childhood, a painful falling-out with her family, and a struggle to find safety and stability in downtown LA.
Whatever the coroner ultimately determines, the throughline in his account is a woman who’d been having a hard time for a long while, and who he says just wanted a stable home.
She was 35, and she leaves behind a body of work almost nobody matches for sheer range. The same voice was Chihiro and Lilo. The same kid was Samara. Comfort and nightmares for the same generation, from one person who was barely out of grade school when she gave them all to us.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
TMZ (June 17, 2026), which broke the news, verified for Roy Hernandez confirming the death, the meningitis and septic blood-infection cause, and the earlier malnutrition hospitalization
Hollywood Life and IBTimes UK (June 17, 2026), verified for the LA County coroner not yet releasing an official cause of death and the details of Hernandez’s GoFundMe describing her hardship
TVInsider and Yahoo Entertainment (June 17, 2026), verified for her career credits including Spirited Away, Donnie Darko, Big Love, and her final 2016 role
IMDb and D23 (career reference), verified for her early career, the Spielberg “God Bless America” detail, and her full filmography