Daveigh Chase, voice of Lilo and Star of The Ring, dies at 35

Daveigh Chase, the actor who voiced Lilo in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch and played the chilling Samara in The Ring, died at 35 on Tuesday, June 16, 2026. Her death closed the life of a former child performer whose work also included Donnie Darko, the English dub of Spirited Away and HBO’s Big Love.

Her boyfriend, Roy Hernandez, said Chase died from meningitis and an infection in her blood that led to septic issues and body shutdown. A legacy notice also listed complications from meningitis as the cause of death. The medical details matter because they point to a final crisis that came after years in which Chase had largely slipped from public view.

That absence was not quiet. Friends and her longtime manager had been trying to locate Chase for years, and one video that circulated in the months before her death showed her on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, looking extremely skinny and barely conscious on the floor of a tent or trailer. Sources familiar with the effort to find her said friends believed she may have dropped to as little as 75 pounds. One report said a private investigator was brought in, and there were plans to move her to a rehab facility in Costa Rica if she was found.

Hernandez also launched a GoFundMe before Chase’s death seeking comfort and end-of-life care. The details underline a stark pattern that extends beyond one performer: once a former child star is pushed into homelessness or severe medical decline, the safety net is often improvised, fragmented and too late. By the time Chase was visible on Skid Row, the public crisis had become impossible to ignore.

Chase’s career had once brought major recognition. In 2002, she won Best Villain at the MTV Movie Awards for The Ring, an early marker of how quickly she moved from child roles to widely seen cultural touchstones. Her death now sharpens the larger question of what support exists when fame fades, especially for young performers whose lives can unravel far from the institutions that profited from their success.