Lisa Marie Presley, a singer-songwriter, Elvis’s only daughter and a devoted custodian of her father’s estate, passed away Thursday after being hospitalized for a medical emergency. She was 54.
Her death at a Los Angeles hospital was confirmed by her mother, Priscilla, a few hours after her daughter was rushed to hospital after suffering a medical emergency at home.
“It is with a heavy heart that I have to share the terrible news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” Priscilla Presley said in a statement. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known.”
The only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, Presley shared her father’s brooding charisma—the hooded eyes, the unashamed smile, the low, sultry voice—and followed him professionally, releasing her own rock albums in the 2000s and appeared on stage with Pat Benatar and Richard Hawley, among others.
She even had an instant musical bond with her father, singing her voice on Elvis recordings like “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t Cry Daddy,” a mournful ballad that reminded him of his mother’s early death. (and Lisa Marie’s grandmother), Gladys Presley.
“It’s been my whole life,” she told The Associated Press in 2012, speaking of her father’s influence. “It’s not something I listen to now and it’s different. Though maybe I listen better. I’m consistent in the fact that I’ve always been an admirer. He has always influenced me.”
Her birth, exactly nine months after her parents’ wedding, was international news and her background was rarely far from her mind. With the release last year of Baz Luhrmann’s major musical feature film ‘Elvis’, Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley joined the film’s stars on red carpets and awards shows.
She attended the Golden Globes on Tuesday to celebrate Austin Butler’s award for playing her father. Just days before, she was in Memphis at Graceland — the mansion where Elvis lived and died — in Memphis on January 8 to celebrate her father’s birthday.
Presley lived with her mother, an actor known for the films “Dallas” and “Naked Gun,” in California after her parents separated in 1973. and seeing his daily entrances down the stairs.
“He was always fully, fully equipped. You would never see him coming down the stairs in his pajamas,” she told The Associated Press in 2012. You would never see him in anything but “ready to be seen” clothes.
Elvis Presley died in August 1977, when he was only 42 and she was 9 years old. Lisa Marie was staying at Graceland at the time and would remember him kissing her goodnight hours before he would collapse and never recover. When she saw him again the next day, he was face down in the bathroom.
“I just had a feeling,” she told Rolling Stone in 2003. “He wasn’t doing well. All I know is that I had it (a feeling), and it happened. I was obsessed with death from a very young age .”
She would later make headlines herself. Struggles with drugs and some very public marriages. Her four husbands were Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage.
Jackson and Presley married in the Dominican Republic in 1994, but the marriage ended two years later and was defined by numerous awkward public appearances, including an unexpected kiss from Jackson at the MTV Video Music Awards and a joint interview with Diane Sawyer when she lost her husband. against allegations that he had sexually assaulted a minor.
Her other celebrity marriage was even shorter: Cage filed for divorce in 2002 after four months of marriage.
“I had to run into a lot of walls and trees,” she told the AP in 2012. “But now I can also look back on it and tell you everything that happened around me and all the different people around me. And all that awww – and it wasn’t a good situation anyway. That didn’t help. Anyway, it was a growing process. It was just in a different way. It was just in front of everyone all the time. Because of course it’s all documented.”
Lisa Marie became involved in numerous humanitarian causes, from poverty alleviation programs administered through the Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. She would receive formal citations for her work from New Orleans and Memphis, Tennessee.
Presley had two children, actor Riley Keough, born in 1989, and Benjamin Keough, born in 1992, with her former husband Danny Keough. She also had twin daughters, Harper and Finley Lockwood, with ex-husband Michael Lockwood in 2008.
Her marriage to Lockwood would end in a combative and lengthy divorce that began in 2016 and was still unresolved when she died, though they were declared single in 2021. The fight put the girls, now 15, in temporary protective custody in 2017. Presley and Lockwood later had joint custody but still disagreed on the issue, with Lockwood seeking more child support from Presley.
Benjamin Keough died by suicide in 2020 at the age of 27. Presley spoke of her grief, writing in an essay last August that she had “lived in the horrific reality of his unrelenting grip since my son’s death two years ago.”
“I have dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of 9. I’ve had it more than anyone else in my life and somehow I made it this far,” she wrote in an essay shared with People magazine.
“But this, the death of my beautiful, beautiful son? The sweetest and most incredible creature I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, who felt so honored every day to be his mother? Who was so much like his grandfather on so many levels that he actually scared me? Which made me worry about him even more than I naturally should have?’ continued the essay. ‘No. Just no… no no no no…”
Lisa Marie became the sole heir to the Elvis Presley Trust after her father died. Along with Elvis Presley Enterprises, the trust managed Graceland and other assets until it sold its controlling interest in 2005. She retained ownership of Graceland Mansion itself, the 13 acres surrounding it, and items in the home. Her son is buried there, along with her father and other members of the Presley family.
Lisa Marie Presley is a former Scientologist – her son was born in 1992 under the direction of Church of Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard, according to an AP story at the time — but later broke with Scientology.
Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley made regular trips to Graceland during huge fan parties on Elvis’s death and birthday anniversaries. One of the two planes at Graceland is called the Lisa Marie.
After her first album, “To Whom It May Concern,” in 2003, some fans came out to see her perform, just out of curiosity given her famous family, she told the AP in 2005.
“First I had to overcome a predetermined idea of myself,” she said of the barriers to becoming a singer-songwriter.
“I had to burst through that and introduce myself, and that was the first hurdle, and then sing for everyone now, and then that was the second, and I’m the offspring of – you know who I am. I’m the offspring of – I undoubtedly had a few hurdles to get through,” she continued. “But the scales never tipped too much in the other direction.”
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Entertainment writer Andrew Dalton contributed to this report.
