Daveigh Chase, Who Voiced Lilo and Haunted Audiences as Samara in The Ring in the Same Year at Age 11, Dies at 35
The child actress accomplished in 2002 what no performer before or since has managed delivering the lead voice performance in a beloved Disney animated film and the villain role in one of horror cinema's most enduring films within the same twelve-month window, at an age when most children were in middle school.
Daveigh Chase died on June 16, 2026, at the age of 35, at a hospital in Los Angeles. Her boyfriend Roy Hernandez confirmed her death to TMZ on June 17, stating that Chase died from meningitis and a blood infection that caused septic complications and, in his words, "her body shutting down."
Chase had been admitted to a Los Angeles hospital earlier that month due to malnutrition. The official cause of death has not yet been released by the Los Angeles County coroner.
The 2002 that defined her and cinema
What Daveigh Chase achieved in 2002 has no precise parallel in the history of American film. Within a single calendar year, she delivered two performances — in entirely different genres, for entirely different audiences that have each outlasted the decade in which they were made.
In 2002, Chase voiced the lead character in Disney's Lilo & Stitch, playing Lilo Pelekai, an orphaned Hawaiian girl who befriends an extraterrestrial she mistakes for a puppy. That same year, she delivered one of horror cinema's most memorable performances as Samara Morgan in The Ring.
She was eleven years old for both productions.
Other News-
-Nintendo Data Breach Statement: Company Responds After Reported Employee Data Exposure
-Telegram CEO Durov Accuses Reliance of BGP Hijacking to Block Access Outside India Including UAE
As Samara Morgan in The Ring, Chase won the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain a recognition given to adult actors in virtually every other year of the award's existence. As Lilo, she won a Young Artist Award and an Annie Award for voice acting, recognition that placed her among the most decorated child performers of her era.
The tonal distance between the two roles is what makes the achievement remarkable. Lilo is warm, eccentric, and emotionally open a child grieving her parents while forming an unlikely family from scratch. Samara is cold, wordless in her most iconic moments, and constructed entirely from physical presence and implication. That an eleven-year-old delivered both in the same year, at a professional level that has kept both films in cultural circulation for more than two decades, is a fact that has not been sufficiently examined in coverage of her death.
The rest of 2002 a year that also included Spirited Away
Chase also voiced Chihiro Ogino in the English-language release of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away in 2002 meaning that in a single year, she contributed her voice to what would become two of the most critically acclaimed animated films of the 21st century, while simultaneously appearing in a horror film that would define the genre for a generation.
Her earlier career
Born Daveigh Elizabeth Chase on 24 July 1990 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and raised in Albany, Oregon, Chase began her career at age seven in commercials and on stage. By age eight, she was appearing in television series including Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, The Practice, and ER. Her breakthrough in film came in 2001 when she was cast as Samantha Darko in Richard Kelly's cult film Donnie Darko, starring alongside Jake Gyllenhaal.
Beginning in 2006, Chase earned a recurring role in the HBO series Big Love, playing Rhonda Volmer across 32 episodes of the five-season run.
Her later years
After a difficult childhood and a painful falling out with her family, Chase was bullied and struggled to find safety and happiness in downtown Los Angeles, according to her boyfriend Roy Hernandez, who wrote in a GoFundMe campaign created before her death: "All she ever wanted was a place where we could live together, feel safe, and be happy."
Chase's father, Schwallier, told the Los Angeles Times his estranged daughter began struggling with drugs at age 13 and had been homeless and living in Los Angeles near the hospital where she died.
News of Chase's death prompted tributes across the entertainment industry and social media. Letterboxd, the film logging platform, posted publicly in her memory, underscoring how deeply her 2002 work had embedded itself in cinephile culture.
No statement has been issued by Disney, DreamWorks, or the producers of The Ring.
The unique angle worth noting: 2002 was the year Daveigh Chase, at eleven years old, appeared in Lilo & Stitch, The Ring, and Spirited Away — three films that are each, by critical and cultural consensus, landmarks of their respective genres. No child performer in Hollywood history has a comparable single-year filmography. That this fact has been noted only in passing in obituary coverage, rather than treated as the extraordinary artistic achievement it represents, reflects how thoroughly the entertainment industry failed to recognise what it had in her while she was alive.
