Daveigh Chase

Most of what people remember of The Ring (2002) is a costume and a haircut. Julie Weiss put Daveigh Chase in a white nightdress and pulled her hair down over her face, and that is the picture the audience carried out of the cinema and has kept since. We still find it unpleasant to look at, and we think we know why: a child whose face you cannot see is a child you cannot read, and adults read children without noticing until they are prevented. Chase was not yet a teenager when she did it. The film around her runs out of fear by the second half; she does not.

The same year she was the voice of Lilo in Lilo & Stitch (2002), and the verdict on that has been steady for two decades: a voice with real feeling in it and proper comic timing, for a character who needed both. She had already dubbed Chihiro in the English version of Spirited Away (2001) and played Samantha, the younger sister, for Richard Kelly in Donnie Darko (2001). Three of those four parts are children who see things adults do not, and one of them is the thing the adults should have seen. It is an unusual spread for a career that had barely started.

Then the parts got smaller and longer. On Big Love (2006 to 2011) she played Rhonda Volmer across 32 episodes, a manipulative teenager in a house full of people with secrets. We rated the series 79 and thought its first two seasons among the best American television of their period; the later ones sprawl, and a recurring part in a sprawling show is a hard place from which to be noticed. Rhonda fits the pattern of the earlier work, a young person other people underestimate, but television gave her more time and less attention.

The films after that were supporting parts, S. Darko (2009) among them, and critics mostly did not turn up. After 2016 she more or less stopped. In 2009 she told an interviewer, "I just want to make something that I love and people will respect. I want to do things that will change someone's life, not something they'll forget about tomorrow." By the time she said it she had already done it, twice, in the same twelve months, and everything afterwards was measured against a girl in a nightdress and a voice coming out of a cartoon.