LOS ANGELES — Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, who helped oversee her famous father’s estate and pursued a music career of her own, has died. She was 54.
Priscilla Presley confirmed her daughter’s death in a statement Thursday evening.
“It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” Presley said in a statement provided to the Associated Press. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known.”
Lisa Marie Presley suffered cardiac arrest at a home near Calabasas Thursday. A source familiar with the incident told the Los Angeles Times she collapsed and had trouble breathing.
Emergency personnel responded to a 10:37 a.m. call at a home off Las Virgenes Road, L.A. County Fire Dept. Capt. Sheila Kelliher confirmed to The Times. Presley was then transported to West Hills Hospital.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, on Feb. 1, 1968, Presley lived most of her life in the spotlight. Her father’s fans closely followed the details of her birth, and tabloids documented her romances with high-profile husbands including musician Michael Jackson and actor Nicolas Cage, among others.
An only child, Presley spent her childhood youth between two households — her father’s Graceland mansion in Memphis and her mother’s home in Los Angeles — after they divorced in October 1973.
When her father died of cardiac arrythmia on Aug. 16, 1977, Presley became the only heir to his massive estate, including his beloved Tennessee home. Her mother, as executor, co-founded Elvis Presley Enterprises, which helped turn Graceland from an overgrown burden to a lucrative tourist attraction.
“I appreciate that I can have that part of my life always stay the same,” Lisa Marie told NPR in 2013. “I think that’s something a lot of people would love to have — your childhood home kept exactly the way it was. It’s heartwarming.”
In 1988, she married aspiring musician Danny Keough in sa small, private ceremony at the Church of Scientology’s Hollywood headquarters. They welcomed daughter Riley Keough and son Benjamin Keough before divorcing in 1994.
Before their separation Presley became eligible to receive her father’s fortune in 1993. Instead of inheriting the funds, she created the Elvis Presley Trust to continue the management of his estate alongside multiple trustees, according to Graceland.
During her days overseeing the Elvis Presley Trust and Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc., Presley married into music royalty. In 1994, she wed the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, and celebrated their “unusual” bond.
“He had something so intoxicating about him, and when he was ready to share with you and be himself ... He was like a drug for me,” she told Oprah Winfrey back then. They divorced in 1996.
Six years later came another high-profile, but short-lived romance. In 2002, she wed actor Nicolas Cage in Hawaii. They divorced in 2004, the same year Presley sold a major portion of the estate in a deal worth approximately $100 million.
Her fourth and final marriage was to guitarist and producer Michael Lockwood in 2006. In 2008 Presley welcomed twin girls, Harper and Finley, with her fellow “Storm & Grace” musician.
The couple divorced in 2016, and in her divorce papers, Presley announced she was $16 million in debt. Two years later she filed a $100-million lawsuit against former business manager Barry Siegel for mismanaging her finances.
When it came to music, Presley looked to define her own path.
She released her debut album, “To Whom It May Concern,” in 2003 at age 35 — old by the youth-centric standards of pop music. Yet the LP, which she made in part with veteran pop producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, made a creative virtue of her years of life experience, with starkly phrased songs about her complicated family history and the disillusioning aspects of celebrity.
“Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis / That’s where my family’s buried and gone / Last time I was there I noticed a space left / Next to them there in Memphis in the damn back lawn,” she sneered over the crunchy pop-rock guitars of “Lights Out,” a modest radio hit that drove “To Whom It May Concern” to a top 5 showing on the Billboard 200 chart and gold-certified sales of more than 500,000 copies.
“I really went back through a lot of the dark corridors of my life in this record,” Presley told The Times in 2003. “I wanted people to know who I am based on my music, not on what they read in the tabloids.”
Presley, who identified Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” as a songwriting inspiration, released a follow-up album, “Now What,” in 2005, led by a knowing cover version of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry.” Her third (and final) studio LP came out in 2012: “Storm & Grace,” a rootsier, more stripped-down effort produced by T Bone Burnett that evoked memories of her father’s earliest recordings at Memphis’ Sun Studio.
She was seen in public as recently as Tuesday when she attended the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, where she joined actor Austin Butler during a red-carpet interview. Butler later won the Golden Globe for best actor in a motion picture drama for playing Presley’s father in Baz Luhrmann’s recent film, “Elvis.”
(Times staff writers Christie D'Zurilla, Richard Winton, Christi Carras and Mikael Wood contributed to this report.)
