{"id":483366,"date":"2026-06-18T09:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T09:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/483366\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T09:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T09:16:09","slug":"lilo-stitch-star-daveigh-chase-dies-at-35-in-la-after-battling-illness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/483366\/","title":{"rendered":"Lilo & Stitch star Daveigh Chase dies at 35 in LA after battling illness"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u201cShe was not very Hollywood. She\u2019d rather eat at Bob\u2019s Big Boy and go home with the cats. She loved acting but wasn\u2019t into the fame scene.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daveigh Chase retired from acting fulltime in 2015. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
Chase gained widespread recognition voicing Lilo in the 2002 animated hit Lilo & Stitch, a role she later reprised in the franchise\u2019s television spin-offs. Before that breakthrough, she voiced Chihiro in the English-language version of Studio Ghibli\u2019s Spirited Away.<\/p>\n
However, in her later years, the Hollywood dream was marked by struggle.<\/p>\n
Reports from multiple outlets say the actor 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The page was raising money \u201cto give her that sense of home and peace in her final days\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hernandez described Chase as being \u201ca light in my life\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut behind the scenes, she\u2019s faced more than her share of hardship. After a difficult childhood and a painful falling out with her family, Daveigh was bullied and struggled to find safety and happiness in downtown LA,\u201d Hernandez said.<\/p>\n
However, Ryan told the California Post the fundraiser was wrong.<\/p>\n
Daveigh Chase found fame after she voiced the lead role of Lilo in Disney\u2019s Lilo & Stitch. Photo \/ Walt Disney<\/p>\n
\u201cApparently, a man claiming to be her \u2018boyfriend\u2019 that none of us friends or her family has heard of has set up a GoFundMe on \u2018her and her family\u2019s behalf\u2019 [and] he set her up as the organiser.\u201d Ryan said there was already a trust account set up to cover costs. <\/p>\n
As of writing, the fund had raised US$3900 ($6730).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cShe was not very Hollywood. She\u2019d rather eat at Bob\u2019s Big Boy and go home with the cats.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64869,74,28119,1975,3221,3390,9436,65188,242755,6179,7126,242756,156,3192,78,33450,55623,242754,111,139,69,29952,205,2737,207368,11548],"class_list":["post-483366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-64869","tag-after","tag-amp","tag-at","tag-battling","tag-best","tag-chase","tag-chilling","tag-daveigh","tag-died","tag-dies","tag-disneys","tag-entertainment","tag-illness","tag-in","tag-known","tag-la","tag-lilo","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-ring","tag-role","tag-star","tag-stitch","tag-voice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}