At the time Ryan said Chase developed sepsis linked to a recent bout of meningitis, adding that she had been admitted to hospital for malnutrition before her death.
Chase started acting at 4 years old, getting her first role when she was 7, but she retired from acting fulltime in 2015, Ryan said.
He told the BBC: “She was the greatest. She loved cats. She worked with cat rescues with us. She was very to herself. She was not very Hollywood. She’d rather eat at Bob’s Big Boy and go home with the cats. She loved acting but wasn’t into the fame scene.”
Daveigh Chase retired from acting fulltime in 2015. Photo / Getty Images
Daveigh Chase as Samara in 2002 film The Ring. Photo / Supplied
Chase gained widespread recognition voicing Lilo in the 2002 animated hit Lilo & Stitch, a role she later reprised in the franchise’s television spin-offs. Before that breakthrough, she voiced Chihiro in the English-language version of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away.
Also in 2002, she starred as the creepy television-emerging nemesis Samara in horror film The Ring.
That earned her an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain. Her additional credits include HBO’s Big Love as Rhonda Volmer, Donnie Darko, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Beethoven’s 5th, ER, and Mercy.
In her later years, however, her Hollywood dream was marked by struggle.
Reports from multiple outlets say Chase was living on Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles before her death, with some outlets showing an unverified image of a skeletal woman, purporting to be Chase, lying in a tent.
A GoFundMe was set up before her death by Roy Hernandez, a man who said he was her boyfriend. On the page, he wrote the actor was suffering complications from an infection in her bloodstream.
But Ryan told the California Post the fundraiser was wrong.
He said the man claiming to be her boyfriend was not known to any of Chase’s long-term friends or family members.