Daveigh Chase, the actress who voiced Lilo in Disney's Lilo and Stitch, voiced Chihiro in the American dub of Spirited Away and played the terrifying Samara Morgan in The Ring, all within the span of a single year at age eleven, has died. She was 35.
Her boyfriend Roy Hernandez confirmed the news to TMZ on Tuesday. Chase died from meningitis and a bloodstream infection that caused septic shock and ultimately led to her body shutting down.
She had been admitted to a Los Angeles hospital earlier in June for malnutrition.
Three beloved films, three indelible performances, all in 2002. Lilo was joyful and strange and desperately lonely in the way that animated Disney characters are allowed to be honest about.
Chihiro was determined and frightened in the way that a child alone in a spirit world navigating adult chaos has to be.
Samara was something else entirely, a pale, wet, methodically terrifying child who crawled out of a television set in the film that traumatized a generation of moviegoers.
Chase won the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain for The Ring. She was twelve years old.
The Year That Defined Her
The specific achievement of Daveigh Chase's 2002 is worth sitting with, because it does not happen. Child actors appear in one thing. Two things, if the timing lines up.
Three defining performances in three wildly different tonal registers in a single calendar year, joyful, tender, genuinely frightening, is the kind of range that most adult actors never demonstrate.
Lilo and Stitch arrived in June 2002. The film follows Lilo Pelekai, a Hawaiian girl who adopts an alien experiment thinking it is an unusual dog, and Chase's vocal performance gave Lilo something that animated characters frequently lack. A sense that the character exists when she is not being observed. Lilo talks to herself.
Lilo mourns her parents. Lilo feeds sandwiches to the one fish she believes is her only friend because no one else will come to her birthday party. Chase's voice made every one of those moments feel real.
Spirited Away was the American theatrical release in September 2002, after it had already become Japan's highest-grossing film ever. Chase voiced Chihiro Ogino, the ten-year-old girl who finds herself trapped in a spirit world and has to work in a bathhouse to rescue her parents who have been turned into pigs.
The English dub required a vocal performance that honored what Daveigh Suzuki and director Hayao Miyazaki had built, a child's voice carrying a full arc of fear, determination and growth. Chase delivered it.
The Ring came in October 2002. Chase played Samara Morgan, the girl in the well, the creature who comes out of the television, the source of the curse that drives the film's entire plot.
Her physical performance in the film, the specific quality of stillness and wrongness she brought to Samara, produced one of the most effective horror images of the 2000s.
The scene of Samara emerging from the television is one of the most referenced moments in American horror filmmaking. Chase was eleven and twelve years old when she filmed it.
The Career After 2002
Chase continued working through the 2000s and into the early 2010s, with her most substantial ongoing role coming on HBO's Big Love, the drama about a fundamentalist polygamist Mormon family.
She played Rhonda Volmer, a recurring character who appeared in 32 episodes across the show's five-season run from 2006 to 2011.
Rhonda is among the most unsettling characters on a show full of unsettling dynamics, a young woman using her position within the polygamist community in ways that made audiences deeply uncomfortable, which is a specific kind of performance that requires the same quality of stillness Chase had demonstrated as Samara.
Her other credits include Donnie Darko, the 2001 film in which she played Samantha Darko, Jake Gyllenhaal's younger sister, Beethoven's 5th, episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and ER, and the series Mercy.
She had numerous run-ins with law enforcement across the years that followed her peak period, documented in press coverage TMZ noted. Her career activity diminished considerably through the 2010s and 2020s.
She was 35 years old. She died from meningitis and septic complications. She had been hospitalized earlier in June for malnutrition before the infection took hold. Her boyfriend Roy Hernandez was the one who called TMZ. Her family has started a GoFundMe.
The Specific Loss
Three performances at age eleven and twelve, released within a span of four months. One of them is one of Disney's most beloved animated films. One of them is widely considered the greatest animated film ever made.
One of them is the most iconic American horror film of the early 2000s.
The child who was capable of all three of those things in the same year was something singular, and the loss of her at 35, decades before anything like the full arc of a life has been lived, is the kind of news that lands differently than older deaths usually do.
Lilo was the girl who was hard to love until Stitch came along, and she loved him anyway. Chihiro was the girl who went into the spirit world and came out the other side. Samara was the girl in the well.
Daveigh Chase was 35 years old. She voiced all three.