“I want to do things that will change someone’s life, not something they’ll forget about tomorrow.” A then-nineteen-year-old Daveigh Chase said that to Interview Magazine in 2009.

Sadly for her, Chase didn’t have a particularly robust acting career, but she absolutely did do unforgettable things that changed people’s lives. In 2002, at the age of twelve, Chase essayed her two most famous roles – both of which were extremely important in my life.

She played the malevolent ghost Samara in the American remake of The Ring, which I saw in theaters while I was still in college, acting as the bridge that would get me into Japanese horror films. And she also voiced Lilo Pelekai in Lilo & Stitch.

No one who has been following me for long can fail to be aware of how important Lilo & Stitch is to me. I’ve written and talked about it frequently enough that friends often give me Stitch-themed gifts (which I am happy to receive). It’s one of the two films that is always in my top four over at Letterboxd (alongside William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill, a combo that introduces me probably as well as anything ever could).

There are lots of reasons why Lilo & Stitch means so much to me, but one of them is certainly Lilo herself. Lilo is arguably the best “weird kid” representation ever put on film, and while a lot of that can be chalked up to how she is written, no small measure belongs to Chase’s delivery of her various lines.

As Samara in The Ring, she has far less to say, but Chase’s physical presence as the waterlogged revenant is undeniable. While the original film’s Sadako may be the gold standard for such saturated specters, the much younger wraith of Samara made a massive cultural impression, and is probably what most people first think of, when they think of The Ring.

Chase had other roles, both before and after. She was Donnie’s young sister in Donnie Darko, lent her voice to the main character in the English dub of Spirited Away (which won an Academy Award), and had a major role in the TV series Big Love.

Like a lot of child stars, she also seems to have had many struggles. Her last acting credits were in 2016. Since then, she was arrested at least twice, and largely disappeared from public view. She apparently also disappeared from the radar of her manager and family, while a “harrowing” social media post from 2025 allegedly shows an emaciated Chase living in LA’s Skid Row.

According to reporting from TMZ and other outlets, she was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital earlier this month for malnutrition. While there, she was diagnosed with meningitis and several blood infections. She died on June 16, 2026, at just thirty-five years old. Her last acting work had been a decade before.

At the time of this writing, that was yesterday, and for now, conflicting accounts of her last days dog the internet. According to John Ryan, identified as Chase’s manager for “more than a decade,” he and Chase’s stepsister had hired a private investigator to try to get her help. Meanwhile, another individual identifying himself as Chase’s boyfriend had set up a GoFundMe just hours before her death – one that Ryan implies is illegitimate.

“… behind the scenes, she’s faced more than her share of hardship,” Roy Hernandez writes on the GoFundMe page. “After a difficult childhood and a painful falling out with her family, Daveigh was bullied and struggled to find safety and happiness in downtown LA.”

I didn’t know Daveigh Chase, and I’m even largely unfamiliar with her work beyond the few films I already mentioned. I don’t know anything about her life, or the particulars of her final days, but I think it’s safe to say that they were tragic, and that she deserved better – because everyone deserves better.

I think it’s also safe to say that, whatever else may have taken place, she certainly did things that changed someone’s life, “not something they’ll forget about tomorrow.”