Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Elvis Presley and a popular musician in her own right, died Thursday, her mother confirmed. She was 54.
“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 to People. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known. We ask for privacy as we try to deal with this profound loss. Thank you for the love and prayers. At this time there will be no further comment.”
Presley’s death came hours after her housekeeper found her unresponsive in her bedroom in Calabasas, California, a source close to the matter told TMZ. Her ex-husband, actor and musician Danny Keough, performed CPR until emergency responders arrived on the scene. She was rushed to the hospital for suspected cardiac arrest.
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Both Presley’s mother, Priscilla, and daughter, the actor Riley Keough, were at her bedside on Thursday afternoon. In the final hours of her life, the 54-year-old was in an induced coma on life support with a temporary pacemaker, TMZ reported.
Just two days before her death, Presley had attended the Golden Globes with her mother and Elvis star Austin Butler, who won Best Actor for his portrayal of the King. The Presleys were seen in tears during the broadcast as Butler thanked them in his acceptance speech. “Lisa Marie and Priscilla, I love you forever,” he told them.
“I’m so proud, and I know that my father would also be very proud,” Presley told a crowd at the Elvis after-party that night.
Born in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, Lisa Marie Presley was just nine years old when her father died—leaving her to reconcile the memories of the man she knew with his outsized legacy. “Oh yeah, he’d always wake me up to sing in the middle of the night, get on the table and sing,” she told Diane Sawyer in an interview. “I remember him as my dad.”
In fact, Elvis doted on his only daughter, she recalled, telling The New York Times in 2003 how he’d flown her out to Idaho on his private jet after an offhanded comment about having never seen snow. The pair landed; she played in the snow for half an hour; and they flew home. “I just knew that he adored me,” she said.
Her father’s death in 1977 was followed quickly by that of her grandfather, Vernon, in 1979, and her great-grandmother, Minnie Mae, a year later. “I didn’t have much of a runway into life,” Presley told Newsweek in 2003. “I was, like, a deep, dark kid who was always melancholy.”
Upon Minnie Mae’s death, the preteen Presley was left the sole heir to Elvis’ vast estate, including his Graceland mansion. She was also thrown to the proverbial tabloid wolves, who delighted in chronicling her birthright: a life in the spotlight.
Her relationships, often high-profile and controversial, only harshened the glare. Presley was married four times, including for 20 months to pop star Michael Jackson in the mid-nineties, and for an even briefer time to actor Nicholas Cage, with the couple’s contentious divorce proceedings outlasting their four-month marriage in 2002.
“Nic and I were just two pirates, and pirates can’t marry each other,” she explained to Newsweek. “They need to marry someone in another profession—a nice little quiet mermaid. Otherwise they sink the ship. Which is what we did.”
It wasn’t until the next year, when she was in her mid-thirties, that Presley released her first album, To Whom It May Concern. The title was a sneering retort to anyone who tried to shove her back under her father’s shadow.
“At first I was really scared of it, which is why I was constantly fighting and having such an attitude about it,” she reflected in 2012. “... I was defensive. But once I got that out of my system—trying to fight to be that whole thing—what came out of my heart just came out.”
To Whom It May Concern was received warmly, but critics couldn’t help but point out the rock ’n’ roll ghost in the room. “Bluesy and bittersweet, it’s good enough to make daddy proud,” the Entertainment Weekly review went. The album was certified gold within two months of its release, ultimately reaching No. 5 on the Billboard 200 charts.
Presley added to her discography with the 2005 album So What and 2012’s raw, rootsy Storm & Grace. Even as her music evolved and matured, she remained the woman with something to prove, titling Storm & Grace’s lead single “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”
At the time of her death, she’d been living with Keough, her first husband, to whom she was married from 1988 to 1994. Presley had moved into Keough’s home after their 27-year-old son, Benjamin, died by suicide in 2020.
Benjamin’s suicide devastated Presley. “My heart and soul went with you,” she wrote on Instagram shortly after. “The depth of the pain is suffocating and bottomless without you every moment of every day.”
More than two years later, Presley penned a first-person essay for People in which she described grief’s “unrelenting” grip on her. “I’ve had more than anyone’s fair share of [death] in my lifetime and somehow, I’ve made it this far,” she wrote. But losing a son was different, and she “beat [herself] up tirelessly and chronically, blaming [herself] every single day,” Presley continued.
The only reason she kept going was “for my girls”—not just Riley, Benjamin’s older sister, but also Finley and Harper, the 14-year-old twins she shared with her fourth and final husband, music producer Michael Lockwood. (The Presley-Lockwood union lasted ten years; they separated in 2016, and their divorce was finalized in 2021. His attorney said Friday after Presley’s death: “Michael’s world has been turned on its ear. He is with both of his daughters now.”)
The split in 2016 rattled her, causing her to check into a Los Angeles rehab facility for a relapse into substance abuse, a demon she’d been struggling with for decades. “I did drugs for four years of my life, from 13 to 17,” she told Rolling Stone in 2003, “and [the tabloids] like to make it like I had this big drug addiction problem. I was never addicted to anything. I was just on self-destructo mode.”
“I did everything but mushrooms and heroin,” she added later. “Those were two things I didn’t take. Thank God. Or crack. That wasn’t really happening then.”
She was clean between the end of her teens and the birth of her twins, developing an opioid dependency after a doctor prescribed them for pain. Her sobriety was attributed in part to the effect of the Church of Scientology, which Priscilla had begun gravitating towards soon after Elvis’ death.
Presley made a clean break from the church in 2014, though she had been distancing herself from the organization for years. “They were taking my soul, my money, my everything,” she said of her eventual decision to leave. Soon after the release of the 2015 documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Presley tweeted, “Sometimes...The S##t hitting the fan is a damn nice sound;)”
If you or a loved one are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. You can also text or dial 988.
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