Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of icon Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, sadly passed away on January 12, 2023 after suffering cardiac arrest. Fifty-four-year-old Presley was taken to a Los Angeles hospital Thursday, after sheriff's deputies responded to a call.
The family announced her passing Thursday evening. "Priscilla Presley and the Presley family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Lisa Marie. They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone, and ask for privacy during this very difficult time."
Lisa Marie Presley is survived by her mother Priscilla, 33-year-old daughter Riley Keough and 14-year-old twins Harper and Finley Lockwood.
- 8 Lisa Marie Presley's Last Appearance
- 7 Lisa Marie Presley's Unsettled Upbringing As The King's Daughter
- 6 Lisa Marie Presley Inherited Elvis' Estate
- 5 Lisa Marie Presley's Series Of High Profile Marriages
- 4 LIsa Marie Presley Had A Successful Singing Career
- 3 Lisa Marie Presley Struggled To Be In Her Father's Shadow
- 2 Lisa Marie Presley's Marriage To Michael Lockwood
- 1 Lisa Marie Presley's Grief Over Lose Of Benjamin Keough
8 Lisa Marie Presley's Last Appearance
Lisa Marie Presley was last seen in public on Tuesday, January 10, 2023, at the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills.
Accompanied by her mother, Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie was seen in tears as they watched Austin Butler win the award for Best Actor in a Film Drama for his portrayal of Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's movie, Elvis.
During an emotional speech, the 31-year-old actor thanked the Presley family for their help during the biopic. "Thank you guys, thank you for opening your hearts, your memories, your home to me," Butler said on stage at the ceremony. "Lisa Marie, Priscilla, I love you forever."
Days before her untimely death, Lisa Marie visited Graceland, the mansion owned by her father in Memphis, Tennessee, to celebrate what would have been his 88th birthday.
7 Lisa Marie Presley's Unsettled Upbringing As The King's Daughter
Lisa Marie Presley was born in Memphis, Tennessee, nine months to the day after her parents married. She spent her early years at Graceland but moved to LA, aged 5, when her parents divorced in 1973. She regularly visited Graceland and was at the home when Elvis passed away in 1977. She was Elvis' only child.
In her teens, she began acting out and experimenting with drugs, resulting in her mother sending her to a series of private schools, including a boarding school in Ojai. Lisa Marie Presley told the Los Angeles Times in 2003 that as a child, she “was kind of a loner, a melancholy and strange child.”
“I had a real self-destructive mode for a while,” she told the outlet. “I never really fit into school. I didn’t really have any direction.”
She would eventually join a local Scientology church. When living at their Celebrity Centre on Sunset Boulevard, she met the musician Danny Keough. They married at the Scientology headquarters in 1988. Lisa had been living at Danny's home since the death of their son, it was reported he performed CPR on Lisa Marie before paramedics arrived.
6 Lisa Marie Presley Inherited Elvis' Estate
In 1993, on her 25th birthday, Lisa Marie Presley inherited the Elvis Presley Trust, which included a business company and a charitable foundation, which were set up by Priscilla Presley as Elvis’s executor.
His trust was worth an estimated $100 million when she inherited it. She was a philanthropist, working to improve homelessness and literacy as well as raising funds for Memphis charities and organizations.
5 Lisa Marie Presley's Series Of High Profile Marriages
In 1994, after six years of marriage and the birth of a son and a daughter, the actress Riley Keough, Lisa Marie went to the Dominican Republic and divorced Danny Keough.
A few weeks later, she married Michael Jackson, with whom she'd been friends since 1992. She has described the superstar as being in “a situation comparable to mine” and that didn't want to marry another man “who gets trampled because they just become Mr Presley”.
When accusations emerged of abuse at his Neverland estate, Lisa Marie felt “he was wrongly accused and, yes, I started falling for him ... I wanted to save him.”
The couple divorced in 1996. Lisa Marie Presley later told Oprah about Michael Jackson's manipulative nature, although admitted it was the way he was raised. "I always confused that manipulation thinking that it meant he didn't love me," she explained. "But I understand it better now. The manipulation was a survival tactic for him."
Two years later, she married Nicolas Cage, after meeting him at a party in 2002 but only stayed married to him for three months. The divorce was finalized in 2004, and she explained that Cage considered her just another Elvis souvenir.
4 LIsa Marie Presley Had A Successful Singing Career
In 1997, Lisa Marie Presley appeared in the music video, "Don’t Cry Daddy," in which she sang a duet with her father. Her vocals were laid over his original recording, marking the 20th anniversary of his death.
She signed a record deal with its producer, David Foster, and spent the next five years preparing for her first album, "To Whom It May Concern" which was produced by Alanis Morissette’s producer Glen Ballard.
The songs, mostly written by Lisa Marie, detailed the personal toll of growing up in the limelight, in such a famous family. The album went to No 5 on the US charts, selling more than 500,000 copies, and the single, Lights Out, peaked at no. 14 with many comparing his smoky tones to Cher.
That first record was followed by two additional albums, 2005’s “Now What” and “Storm & Grace” in 2012.
3 Lisa Marie Presley Struggled To Be In Her Father's Shadow
It's never easy growing up with a famous parent, let alone having Elvis Presley as a father. The lyrics to her songs often depicted to the dark, loneliness of life in the spotlight.
Her mother saw how growing up around her father impacted her. “Lisa Marie was so used to seeing people jump at her father’s command, that she took years to overcome this habit,” the actress said in 1993.
“It’s a blessing and a curse,” Lisa Marie explained in a 2012 Union-Tribune interview. “Even at the expense of shooting myself in the foot, I need to rebel. With my first two albums, I needed to find myself and get fans by making music I wanted to make and not have anyone pushing me into contrived places. I needed to prove I could make it on my own, with my own songwriting. And, to some degree, it worked. On the other hand, I shot myself in the foot.”
2 Lisa Marie Presley's Marriage To Michael Lockwood
In 2015, Lisa Marie married Michael Lockwood, the guitarist in her band, with Danny Keough acting as the best man.
In 2010, they moved to a mansion in the UK, close to the Scientology church’s headquarters. The couple had twin daughters in 2008 but announced their split in 2016. She entered rehab in 2016 for opioid and painkiller use, which developed following the birth of her twin daughters, Harper and Finley.
Her divorce papers claimed she was $16 million in debt, although in 2004 she had sold 85% of the Elvis Presley Trust, keeping Graceland and its contents. In 2018, she filed a $100 million lawsuit against her former business manager, Barry Siegel.
1 Lisa Marie Presley's Grief Over Lose Of Benjamin Keough
In 2020, Lisa Marie Presley’s son Benjamin Keough died by suicide at the age of just 27. Last August, Presley wrote an essay on grief for People about "the horrific reality" of losing her son.
"I've dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of nine years old," she wrote, referring to her age when Elvis died in 1977 from a heart attack when he was 42. "I've had more than anyone's fair share of it in my lifetime and somehow, I've made it this far."
“My and my three daughters’ lives as we knew it were completely detonated and destroyed by his death. We live in this every. Single. Day,” she wrote in the essay. “Grief is something you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, in spite of what certain people or our culture wants us to believe. You do not ‘get over it,’ you do not ‘move on,’ period.”
Presley also said in the essay that she found comfort in the company of people who have faced similar tragedies, adding that her daughters helped keep her grounded.
“I keep going for my girls,” she wrote. “I keep going because my son made it very clear in his final moments that taking care of his little sisters and looking out for them were on the forefront of his concerns and his mind. He absolutely adored them and they him.”
