Daveigh Chase, ‘The Ring’ and ‘Lilo & Stitch’ actress, dies at 35

Daveigh Chase, the child actress who terrified horror audiences as the ghostly Samara in “The Ring” and charmed a generation of young viewers as the voice of Lilo in Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch,” has died. She was 35.

Her boyfriend, Roy Hernandez, told TMZ that Ms. Chase died Tuesday from meningitis and an infection in her blood, which caused septic complications and led to her body shutting down. She had been admitted to a Los Angeles hospital earlier this month for malnutrition.

Ms. Chase broke into Hollywood at age 8 after a family road trip to Los Angeles turned into an unexpected stay when her mother was told she could not drive for six months following a car accident, according to Interview Magazine. She began going on auditions and never stopped.

Her big-screen breakthrough came in 2001, when she played Samantha Darko, the younger sister of Jake Gyllenhaal’s troubled title character, in the psychological thriller “Donnie Darko.” The following year proved transformative: she voiced the spirited young heroine Chihiro in the English-language dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” and played the lead in Disney’s animated hit “Lilo & Stitch.”

That same year, she delivered the performance that would define her legacy. As Samara Morgan — the long-haired, rubber-jointed specter who crawls out of a television set to claim her victims — Ms. Chase turned “The Ring” into a cultural phenomenon. Her performance earned her the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain, beating out nominees including Daniel Day-Lewis, Mike Myers, Willem Dafoe and Colin Farrell.

Beyond her film work, Ms. Chase was a fixture on television throughout the early 2000s, with guest roles on “ER,” “The Practice,” “Touched by an Angel” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Her most prominent television role came in HBO’s “Big Love,” in which she played Rhonda Volmer — an intended teenage bride raised in a fundamentalist polygamist community — for 32 episodes across the series’ five-season run beginning in 2006.

Ms. Chase made her final screen appearances in the 2016 films “American Romance” and “Jack Goes Home,” a psychological horror thriller in which she played a supporting role opposite Rory Culkin and Lin Shaye. She had largely stepped away from the spotlight in the years since.

“I just want to make something that I love and people will respect,” Ms. Chase told Interview Magazine in 2009. “I want to do things that will change someone’s life, not something they’ll forget about tomorrow.”