Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis Presley’s daughter, died at the age of 54

Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis Presley’s only child and a singer-songwriter committed to her father’s legacy, died Thursday after being admitted to the hospital for a medical emergency. She was 54 years old.

Her mother, Priscilla, announced her death at a Los Angeles hospital a few hours after her daughter was brought there by paramedics following a medical incident at her house.

“It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating 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.”

Presley inherited her father’s brooding charm — the hooded eyes, the arrogant smirk, the deep, sexy voice — and professionally followed him, producing her own rock albums in the 2000s and performing on stage with Pat Benatar and Richard Hawley, among others.

Presley inherited her father’s gloomy appeal — the hooded eyes, the arrogant smirk, the deep, sexy voice — and professionally followed him, producing her own rock albums in the 2000s and performing on stage with Pat Benatar and Richard Hawley, among others.

She even forged direct musical relations with her father, lending her voice to Elvis songs such as “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t Cry Daddy,” a melancholy ballad that reminded him of his mother (and Lisa Marie’s grandmother), Gladys Presley’s early death.

“It’s been all my life,” she said of her father’s impact to The Associated Press in 2012. “It’s not something that I now listen to and it’s different. Although I might listen closer. I remain consistent on the fact that I’ve always been an admirer. He’s always influenced me.”

Her birth, nine months after her parents’ wedding, made international headlines, and her family history was never far from her thoughts. With the release of Baz Luhrmann’s huge musical movie “Elvis” last year, Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley began attending red carpets and award events with film stars.

She was in attendance at the Golden Globes on Tuesday to celebrate Austin Butler’s prize for playing her father. On Jan. 8, she was in Memphis at Graceland — the estate where Elvis lived and died — to celebrate her father’s birthday.

After her parents divorced in 1973, Presley moved to California to live with her mother, an actress renowned for “Dallas” and the “Naked Gun” films. During her travels to Graceland, she recalls riding golf carts through the neighbourhood and observing her father’s daily descent down the steps.

“He was always fully, fully geared up. You’d never see him in his pajamas coming down the steps, ever,” she told The Associated Press in 2012. “You’d never see him in anything but ‘ready to be seen’ attire.”

Elvis Presley died in August 1977, when he was 42 years old and she was nine years old. Lisa Marie was staying at Graceland at the time, and she remembered him kissing her goodbye hours before he collapsed and died. The next time she saw him, he was laying face down in the restroom.

“I just had a feeling,” she told Rolling Stone in 2003. “He wasn’t doing well. All I know is I had it (a feeling), and it happened. I was obsessed with death at a very early age.”

She would subsequently create her own news. Drug problems and several extremely prominent weddings. Among her four spouses were Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage.

Jackson and Presley married in the Dominican Republic in 1994, but the marriage ended two years later due to a series of awkward public appearances, including an unexpected kiss from Jackson at the MTV Video Music Awards and a joint interview with Diane Sawyer in which she defended her husband against allegations of sexual abuse of a minor.

Her other celebrity marriage was even shorter: Cage filed for divorce after four months of marriage in 2002.

“I had to sort of run into many walls and trees,” she told the AP in 2012. “But now I can also look back at it and tell you all the stuff that was going on around me and all the different people around me and all the awww — and it was not a good situation anyway. That wasn’t helping. Either way, it was a growing process. It was just in a different way. It was just out in front of everybody all the time. Because it’s all documented of course.”

Lisa Marie became active in a variety of humanitarian projects, ranging from anti-poverty programmes run by the Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation to relief operations following Hurricane Katrina. For her efforts, she received formal accolades from New Orleans and Memphis, Tennessee.

With her former spouse Danny Keough, Presley has two children: actress Riley Keough, born in 1989, and Benjamin Keough, born in 1992. In 2008, she and ex-husband Michael Lockwood had twin daughters, Harper and Finley Lockwood.

Her marriage to Lockwood would result in a contentious and long divorce that began in 2016 and was still unresolved when she died, despite the fact that they were formally divorced in 2021. The girls, now 15, were placed in protective care following the fight in 2017.

Presley and Lockwood eventually shared custody, but they remained at odds over the matter, with Lockwood demanding additional child support from Presley.

Benjamin Keough, 27, committed suicide in 2020. Presley was open about her sorrow, writing in August in an article that she had “been living in the horrific reality of its unrelenting grips since my son’s death two years ago.”

“I’ve dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of 9 years old. I’ve had more than anyone’s fair share of it in my lifetime and somehow, I’ve made it this far,” she wrote in an essay shared with People magazine.

“But this one, the death of my beautiful, beautiful son? The sweetest and most incredible being that I have ever had the privilege of knowing, who made me feel so honored every single 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 would have?” the essay continued. “No. Just no … no no no no …”

After her father died, Lisa Marie became the only heir to the Elvis Presley Trust. The trust maintained Graceland and other assets with Elvis Presley Enterprises until she sold her controlling stake in 2005. She kept possession of the Graceland Mansion, as well as the 13 acres around it and the contents of the mansion. Her son, as well as her father and other Presley family members, are buried there.

Lisa Marie Presley is a former Scientologist — her kid was born in 1992 under Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s standards, according to an AP report at the time — but she later left Scientology.

Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley would visit Graceland on several occasions, including the anniversaries of Elvis’ death and birthday. The Lisa Marie is the name of one of Graceland’s two aircraft.

Following the release of her debut album, “To Whom It May Concern,” in 2003, some people came out to watch her play just out of curiosity, she told the Associated Press in 2005.

“First I had to overcome a pre-speculated idea of me,” she said of the barriers to becoming a singer-songwriter.

“I had to sort of burst through that and introduce myself, and that was the first hurdle, and then now sing in front of everybody, and then that was the second one, and I’m the offspring of — you know, who I’m the offspring of — I had a few hurdles to get through, no doubt about it,” she continued. “But the scales never tipped in the other direction too much.”

Main Image:Lisa Marie Presley/ Brian Wilson on Twitter

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