The actress who voiced Lilo in the original Lilo & Stitch and terrified a generation as Samara in The Ring has died. She was 35 years old.
Daveigh Chase, the actress and voice artist best known for voicing Lilo Pelekai in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, has bid her final goodbye. According to TMZ, confirmed by Deadline, Chase died on Tuesday after developing meningitis and a serious bloodstream infection. The sepsis that resulted led to severe complications and ultimately organ failure. The actress was hospitalised in Los Angeles earlier this month due to malnutrition.
Her boyfriend, Roy Hernandez, had set up a GoFundMe page as her condition deteriorated. In the post, he wrote that Chase had been diagnosed with meningitis and several serious blood infections. That doctors told him she did not have much time left. He went on to describe the difficulties she had faced in recent years. These included bullying, having a strained relationship with her family, and a struggle to find stability in downtown LA. He spoke of moments that had both elements of happiness and hope. Moments that the two shared together before her health took its final turn. She was 35 years old. And that is far, far too young.
For a lot of people, Daveigh Chase is Lilo. Born in Las Vegas on July 24, 1990. She started her career at age seven, appearing in commercials and stage productions before landing small TV roles in Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, The Practice, and ER. By the time she was eleven, she was voicing the lead role of Chihiro in the English dub of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away and playing Samantha Darko in Donnie Darko. Both in the same year, both remarkable, but sadly neither the role she’d be most remembered for.
That came in 2002. Lilo & Stitch is one of those films that hit differently to most Disney animated movies of that era. It had real heart, real sadness, and real humour woven into it in a way that didn’t talk down to kids or up to adults. A big part of why Lilo worked as a character and why she felt real, a little odd and completely loveable, was because of Chase’s voice performance. At just eleven years old, she nailed it.
That same year she also played Samara Morgan in The Ring, the long-haired girl in white who crawled out of the television and ruined the sleep schedules of an entire generation. The two roles couldn’t have been more different. Disney’s warm-hearted misfit with a heart of gold, and horror cinema’s most quietly terrifying child antagonist. And went on to win Best Villain at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards for it.
She then reprised Lilo across the franchise voicing Stitch for the movie, Lilo & Stitch: The Series, and Leroy & Stitch. She also had a supporting role in the HBO series Big Love from 2006 to 2011. Her last screen credit was the horror film Jack Goes Home in 2016, after which she stepped away from acting. She faced legal issues during that period, including drug-related offences, and by all accounts the years that followed were difficult ones. She did not return for the live-action Lilo & Stitch remake last year, with Maia Kealoha stepping into the role instead.
There is something quietly devastating about the fact that a voice so tied to one of Disney’s most beloved characters belonged to someone who clearly had a very hard road in the years that followed. Daveigh Chase gave a lot of people something genuinely wonderful. She deserved more time to figure out the rest.
Rest in peace!
