Daveigh Chase, Voice of Lilo, Dies at 35

What Roy Hernandez said about her final illness

According to Hernandez, Chase had been dealing with serious health problems before her death. He said she suffered from meningitis and a blood infection, which then caused septic complications.

He also said she had been hospitalized in Los Angeles earlier in June for malnutrition. No further medical details were provided in the initial account.

For audiences who grew up with her work, the news hits with an unusual kind of whiplash. Chase was closely tied to characters from childhood favorites, but she also became unforgettable in one of the decade’s bleakest horror films. Few performers are remembered both for giving warmth to a Disney protagonist and for crawling out of a television set in the collective imagination. Hollywood does enjoy range, apparently.

How she became the voice of Lilo

Chase’s breakthrough came as a child actor in Disney’s 2002 animated film Lilo & Stitch, where she voiced Lilo Pelekai, the lonely, stubborn Hawaiian girl at the center of the story.

The role was not just cute-kid voice work. Lilo was messy, grieving, funny, and difficult in ways children in animated films were not always allowed to be. Chase gave the character a plainspoken emotional force that helped turn the film into one of Disney’s most enduring titles from that period.

She continued in the role for the follow-up television series, keeping Lilo’s voice present beyond the original film. Chase also voiced Chihiro Ogino in the American dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, connecting her name to another animated classic from the same era.

Why horror fans remember Samara Morgan

If Disney viewers knew Chase as Lilo, horror audiences knew her for something much colder: Samara Morgan in The Ring.

Her performance as the vengeful child at the center of the 2002 horror film became one of the defining scary images of that decade. The long black hair, the stillness, the stare, the extremely poor television etiquette. It all stuck.

The role earned Chase Best Villain at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards, a notable achievement for a young actor in a film built around dread rather than dialogue. Samara became the kind of horror figure people could recognize instantly, even if they had only half-watched the movie through their fingers.

That contrast, between Lilo’s vulnerable chaos and Samara’s silent menace, remains one of the clearest signs of Chase’s early range.

The other roles that shaped her career

Chase also appeared in Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko as Samantha Darko, the younger sister of the title character. She later returned to the part as the lead in the 2009 sequel S. Darko.

Her credits also included:

Beethoven’s 5th
Sabrina the Teenage Witch
ER
Mercy
The 2016 thriller Jack Goes Home

On television, Chase had a recurring role on HBO’s Big Love as Rhonda Volmer, appearing across the show’s five-season run. The role became one of her most notable later screen performances, after the years when her voice work and horror role had defined so much of her public image.

Chase’s career reached very different audiences, often when they were young enough for the roles to stick. For some, she will always be Lilo: wounded, funny, and fiercely human. For others, she will remain Samara, the nightmare that made an entire generation briefly suspicious of old videotapes. Both are hard to forget.