‘Ring’ and ‘Lilo & Stitch’ star Davey Chase dies at 35
Davey Chase, a young actress known for her roles in “The Ring” and “Lilo & Stitch,” has reportedly passed away. She was 35 years old.
Davey Chase, a young actress known for her roles in “The Ring” and “Lilo & Stitch,” has reportedly passed away. She was 35 years old.
According to TMZ, Chase passed away on Tuesday, June 16th from meningitis and a blood infection, her boyfriend Roy Hernandez told the show. According to TMZ, she was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital earlier this month due to malnutrition.
USA TODAY has reached out to Chase’s representatives for comment.
Chase burst onto the big screen at the age of 10, co-starring as Jake Gyllenhaal’s sister Samantha in the 2001 psychological thriller Donnie Darko. She continued to enjoy success as a voice actress, playing the young heroine Chihiro in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and the misfit Lilo in Disney’s 2002 animated hit Lilo & Stitch.
That same year, she terrified horror fans with her role in The Ring as the iconic long-haired, rubber-jointed Samara, who crawls out of television to claim her victims. Her bone-chilling performance earned her the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain, beating out Daniel Day-Lewis, Mike Myers, Willem Dafoe, and Colin Farrell.
“What I meant was…everyone is going to suffer!” Chase playfully whispered into the onstage microphone, laughing as he imitated a character accepting a trophy.
Chase was born in Las Vegas and raised in Albany, Oregon. According to Interview Magazine, she became interested in acting when her mother crashed her car in Los Angeles during a family vacation at the age of eight. Doctors told her mother she wouldn’t be able to drive for six months, and the family remained in LA, where Chase began auditioning.
In addition to his film work, Chase appeared on television throughout the early 2000s, guest starring on ER, The Practice, Touched by an Angel, and CSI. Her most notable television role was on HBO’s “Big Love” as Rhonda Vollmer, a teenage bride-to-be raised in a Mormon polygamist sect.
Chase made his last film appearance in the 2016 thriller American Romance, starring Jon Savage. She has stayed out of the spotlight for most of the past decade, accumulating about 50 credits in film and television over about 20 years.
Chase told Interview Magazine in 2009, “I just want to make something that I love and that people respect. I want to make something that changes someone’s life, not something that will be forgotten tomorrow.”
