Daveigh Chase, the American actress whose voice gave warmth to a beloved Disney heroine and whose stillness gave a generation of moviegoers their most enduring scare, died on June 16, 2026. She was 35.

Born Daveigh Elizabeth Chase on July 24, 1990, in Las Vegas, Nevada, she was raised in Albany, Oregon, and discovered performing early. She began working professionally at age seven, appearing in commercials and on stage, and within a year had turned up in guest roles on television series including Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, The Practice and ER, as reported by Deadline. What might have been an ordinary child-actor resume quickly became something rarer. Before she was a teenager, she had already lent her voice and her face to characters that would outlast the films that made them.

In 2002 she voiced Lilo Pelekai, the fierce, lonely, big-hearted little girl at the center of Disney's Lilo & Stitch. It was a performance built almost entirely on sound, and Chase filled it with stubbornness and tenderness in equal measure, giving the film its emotional anchor. Audiences who never saw her face knew her instantly by her voice. She returned to the role across the film's sequels and its Disney Channel series, and her work was recognized with an Annie Award for outstanding voice acting in an animated feature production, Variety noted in remembering her.

The same year, Chase stepped into a role of an entirely different temperature. In the horror film The Ring she played Samara Morgan, the figure trapped within a cursed videotape, and made her one of the defining screen presences of early-2000s horror. The performance asked for menace conveyed through patience and quiet rather than spectacle, and it unsettled audiences so completely that she was named Best Villain at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards. That a young performer could be, in the same season, the heart of a children's film and the nightmare of a horror landmark spoke to a range well beyond her years.

Her voice traveled further still. She provided the English-language dub of Chihiro Ogino, the brave girl at the heart of Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away, introducing that character to many English-speaking audiences. On screen she appeared as Samantha Darko, the younger sister of Jake Gyllenhaal's title character, in Donnie Darko, a role she later reprised in the 2009 sequel S. Darko. On television she took a recurring part as Rhonda Volmer on HBO's drama Big Love, a more grown-up showcase that revealed the actress emerging from the child performer.

Those who knew her remembered the person behind the roles. "Daveigh was the sweetest woman on the planet and this is a huge loss to all of us," said John Ryan Jr., her longtime representative and friend of seventeen years, in a tribute reported by Yahoo Entertainment. Her partner, Roy Hernandez, reflecting on their life together, said simply, "When we met, I promised to protect her and give her the love and comfort she deserved," in remarks shared with E! News.

Daveigh Chase leaves behind a body of work that is woven into the childhoods and the late-night memories of millions. To one audience she will always be Lilo, the small girl who insisted that family means nobody gets left behind. To another she will always be Samara, an image that lingers long after the screen goes dark. That a single performer could hold both of those places at once is its own kind of legacy. Her characters were the work of a young artist who understood, instinctively, how to make a feeling land. They will go on being watched, quoted and passed down, and through them her voice and her presence will keep finding new audiences for many years to come.