Daveigh Chase has died. An actor and voice performer whose most prominent work happened when she was still a teenager, Chase spent the period from 2001 to 2010 starring in a pretty staggering run of films: Influential horror movies, Studio Ghibli translations, and—courtesy of her titular role in the Lilo & Stitch franchise—as the voice of a major Disney animated film. Her death, from meningitis and a blood infection, was reported by TMZ on Wednesday. Chase was 35.
Born in Nevada, Chase began working in Hollywood when she was just 8 years old, appearing in a small part in an episode of Sabrina The Teenaged Witch. In the early 2000s, she then rolled from a prominent guest star part on an episode of ER that helped introduce her to national audiences into her first film role: As younger sister (and committed Sparkle Motion member) Samantha Darko in Richard Kelly’s cult sci-fi favorite Donnie Darko. (Chase would later reprise the role for 2009 sequel S. Darko, a film that both Kelly, and fans of the original, disavowed.)
That same period also saw Chase begin working as a voice actor, scoring a major role right out of the gate: The English voice of heroine Chihiro in the Disney-produced dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Chase would continue her relationship with Disney the following year, when she was cast as Lilo in the studio’s latest animated feature, Lilo & Stitch. Praised by fans and critics for her energetic performance, Chase would stay with the franchise for the next several years, appearing in direct-to-DVD sequel films and starring in ABC’s Lilo & Stitch: The Series.
Meanwhile, 2002 saw Chase make similar contributions to the realm of horror, as she gave a small, but memorable, performance as the human version of malevolent spirit Samara Morgan in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. Appearing in videos and flashbacks, Chase gives a genuinely unsettling performance in the film, helping to sell the wrongness of Samara even before she transforms into the classic guise of the stringy-haired ghost girl. (It also meant that Chase was one of the few people who could claim to have simultaneously beaten both Willem Dafoe and Daniel Day-Lewis in an acting competition—courtesy of her 2003 Best Villain triumph at the MTV Movie Awards.)
For a time, it seemed like Chase might weather the transition into more adult acting successfully, landing a prominent recurring role in HBO’s Big Love that stretched from 2006 to 2011. But then her acting jobs seemed to dry up, at the same time as personal problems began to make headlines, with her final acting roles (in much smaller films like 2016’s Jack Goes Home) giving way to stories of arrests. Chase essentially vanished from headlines altogether, until this week, when it was revealed that she’d been checked into a Los Angeles hospital for treatment for severe malnutrition. She was subsequently diagnosed with meningitis and other systemic infections, and reportedly died from her illnesses on Tuesday.
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