It is with great sadness we bring you news that Daveigh Chase, who voiced Lilo in Disney's animated classic Lilo & Stitch and terrified cinemagoers
It is with great sadness we bring you news that Daveigh Chase, who voiced Lilo in Disney’s animated classic Lilo & Stitch and terrified cinemagoers as The Ring‘s Samara, has died at the age of just 35. The former child star, who made her screen debut aged just eight and went on to appear in 50 projects over the course of her career, died on 16 June after battling meningitis and a blood infection, per TMZ‘s reporting.
Born on 24 July, 1990 in Las Vegas, Nevada, Daveigh Elizabeth Chase broke into the world of acting before she’d even broken out of adolescence — her path to stardom paved by a strange twist of fate. At the age of eight, a adolescent Daveigh found herself temporarily stuck in L.A. after a car crash cruelly cut brief a planned family road trip. With her mother unable to drive for six months, Daveigh was encouraged to nurture her burgeoning love for the arts, a passion stoked — as she would later reveal to Interview Magazine — by nineties kids’ TV staple Barney. Before long, petite parts in the likes of Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Charmed, and ER started coming through. And before Daveigh Chase had even hit teenage, she would have booked the roles that would go on to cement her place in film history.
In an honestly quite remarkable spell between the Octobers of 2001 and 2002, Daveigh Chase found herself appearing in four incredibly different, arguably equally iconic movies. First up, Chase appeared opposite Jake Gyllenhaal n Richard Kelly’s cult classic Donnie Darko as Donnie’s kid sister Samantha (a role she would later reprise in 2009 DTV sequel S. Darko.) Then, over the summer and early autumn of 2002, Chase went on to lend her voice to the adolescent leads of the East and West’s two then-biggest animated movie events.
As Lilo & Stitch‘s Lilo Pelekai — a character she would go on to play again and again in Stitch! The Movie, Leroy & Stitch, and Lilo & Stitch: The Series — an Annie Award-winning Chase brought attitude and pathos in abundance to a very different kind of Disney heroine than fans of the House of Mouse had seen before. And as the voice of ten-year-old Chihiro in the English-language dub of coming-of-age fantasy epic Spirited Away, Chase beautifully carried her lead’s journey through Hayao Miyazaki’s spirit-filled bathhouse, executing Chihiro’s arc from innocence to experience — timidity to bravery — beautifully. Before the year was through, Chase would also go on to fuel the nightmares of millions with a genuinely terrifying, all-timer ‘creepy kid’ turn in Gore Verbinski’s remake of cursed VHS tape horror The Ring.
Beyond that wild four-film run, Chase continued to be a regular fixture on our screens (and, thankfully, not crawling out from them) as she entered her teens and navigated the maelstrom that is early adulthood. On the massive screen, Daveigh Chase was on the call sheet for indie fare like Nick Cassettes’ 2012 TIFF darling Yellow and starred opposite Rory Culkin, Natasha Lyonne, and a adolescent Britt Robertson in Thomas Dekker’s SXSW premiered low-budget horror joint Jack Goes Home. And on the petite screen, Chase memorably played Mormon wife Rhonda Volmer to Harry Dean Stanton’s Roman Grant in HBO drama Big Love, before subsequently dipping back into voice acting to lead PBS Kids’ series Betsy’s Kindergarten Adventures.
Daveigh Elizabeth Chase was a multi-talented actor whose legacy — and, perhaps most poignantly, voice — will surely live on for many years to come. Our thoughts are with her friends, family, and loved ones at this exceptionally complex time.
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