DeHuff was born in Antlers, Oklahoma, and raised in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She began her acting career by earning a bachelor’s degree in drama from Carnegie Mellon University. She would also meet and later marry executive producer and director Ari Palitz, whom she met at Carnegie Mellon. DeHuff landed her first big role in the hit comedy Meet the Parents, in which she played Teri Polo’s character’s sister, Deborah Byrnes. Though she died, her character lived on in the film’s sequels as she is frequently mentioned but never appears onscreen (even though the first sequel, Meet the Fockers, was filmed and released prior to her death). After Meet the Parents, DeHuff had a regular role in the 2002 TV series The Court and appeared in CSI: Miami, Without a Trace, Dragnet, The Practice, and Monk. Between 2004 and 2005, DeHuff worked on three feature films. One of these, Unbeatable Harold, was directed by her husband. DeHuff became ill and was allegedly misdiagnosed twice by doctors who failed to recognize that she had pneumonia. She had been sick for several days before her death and went to two different hospitals where she was misdiagnosed. DeHuff complained to her husband the morning of February 15 that her chest was in so much pain that it hurt to even talk and that she needed to go back to the hospital. Taken to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, she was found to have an aggressive form of viral pneumonia that, a friend says, led to a staph infection, sepsis, and then cardiac arrest. She died on February 16, 2005, in Los Angeles. DeHuff’s official cause of death, according to her mother, was sepsis complicated by pneumonia, asthma, and a staph infection.