Daveigh Chase, the American actress who as a child gave voice to the irrepressible Lilo in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch and delivered one of early-2000s horror cinema’s most indelible villains in The Ring, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 35. Her boyfriend, Roy Hernandez, confirmed to US entertainment media that she died on Tuesday after meningitis and a severe blood infection triggered sepsis and progressive organ failure. She had been admitted to hospital earlier in the month suffering from malnutrition, a detail that, viewed from Los Angeles, underscores a harrowing final chapter for a performer who had stepped away from the screen nearly a decade ago.

Chase’s breakthrough came in 2002, a year that defined her public legacy on multiple continents. She was barely twelve when she originated the role of Lilo Pelekai, the lonely Hawaiian girl who adopts a blue alien, earning an Annie Award for voice acting and embedding herself in the childhood memories of a global generation. That same year she played Samara Morgan, the drowned child whose crawl from a television screen became a defining image of J-horror’s Hollywood remakes, a performance that won her the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain. European audiences also came to know her as the English voice of Chihiro in Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, while Latin American and Asian markets embraced her through dubbed versions of the same films. Across the Atlantic, Italian and Swedish obituaries this week recalled her as the “baby star dell’horror” and the “skådisen” who made the ring cycle a cultural phenomenon.

After a supporting role in Donnie Darko and a five-season run on HBO’s Big Love, Chase effectively retired from acting in 2016. Reports from US outlets, corroborated by her manager of fifteen years, John Ryan Jr., describe a woman who became increasingly reclusive, grappling with substance abuse and periods of homelessness. Friends told American media they had spent years trying to locate her, unaware that she had been living in a homeless encampment in her final months. A GoFundMe campaign launched by Hernandez before her death spoke of a “painful break with her family” and a difficult childhood, framing her medical crisis as the culmination of long-standing vulnerabilities that the entertainment industry often fails to address.

The news ricocheted through social media in multiple languages, with fans from Indonesia to Argentina sharing clips of her performances. Indian and Middle Eastern outlets noted the irony of a voice that embodied childhood innocence being silenced so young. Public-health commentators in Europe have pointed to the meningitis-sepsis pathway as a reminder of how quickly untreated infections can overwhelm a malnourished body, while industry observers in London and Los Angeles are already drawing comparisons to other former child stars whose post-fame lives ended in tragedy. Chase’s death leaves behind a complicated legacy: two iconic roles that remain untouched by time, and a private struggle that the public only glimpsed when it was too late.