Lisa Marie Presley born 1 February 1968

Lisa Marie Presley (February 1, 1968 – January 12, 2023) was an American singer and songwriter. She was the only child of singer and actor Elvis Presley and actress Priscilla Presley, as well as the sole heir to her father's estate after her grandfather and great-grandmother died. 

Lisa Marie was born in Memphis, Tennessee, nine months to the day after her parents married. She spent her early years at Graceland but, when she turned five, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles; the Presleys divorced in 1973. Lisa Marie visited Memphis regularly, where her father doted on her, once flying her in a private jet to Idaho so she could see snow for the first time and play in it for an hour. She was at Graceland when Elvis died in August 1977. 

In Los Angeles, her mother was more disciplinarian, but having converted to Scientology enrolled her at the church’s Apple school. Lisa Marie left the Westlake school for girls when she was 17. Her life was increasingly wild until, the next year, she awoke after a drug-filled party and went to the local Scientology church. She wound up living at their Celebrity Centre on Sunset Boulevard, and there she met the musician Danny Keough. They married at the Scientology headquarters in 1988. 

On her 25th birthday, in 1993, she inherited the Elvis Presley Trust, which included a business company and a charitable foundation, which were set up by Priscilla as Elvis’s executor. It was worth an estimated $100m at that point, though when Elvis died it had been worth only about $5m, and owed more in taxes. Lawsuits against Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, helped restore some of its wealth, and Lisa Marie became a notable philanthropist. 

In 1994, after six years of marriage and the birth of a son and a daughter, Lisa Marie went to the Dominican Republic, divorced Keough and a few weeks later married Michael Jackson. Begging for privacy, they returned to the US and began their honeymoon at Trump Tower in New York. Lisa Marie had first met Jackson when she was seven, at a show in Las Vegas, but they became friendly in 1992. They divorced in 1996 after accusations emerged of child abuse at his Neverland estate, where, as at Graceland, everything revolved around him. 

                                    

In 1997 she appeared in a music video, Don’t Cry Daddy, in which she sang a duet with her father – her vocals laid over his original recording – to mark 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 (2003), produced by Alanis Morissette’s producer Glen Ballard. It went to No 5 on the US charts, selling more than 500,000 copies, and a single, Lights Out, reached No 18, and 16 in the UK. By then, on the 25th anniversary of her father’s death, in August 2002, she had married the actor Nicolas Cage, who, in the 1992 film Honeymoon in Vegas, had joined the skydiving Flying Elvises impersonators. Their honeymoon was short; Cage filed for divorce that November. Lisa Marie said Cage considered her just another Elvis souvenir. 

Lockwood & Lisa Marie

Her second album, Now What (2005), reached No 9 in the charts, and her cover of Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry became a hit single. That year she married Michael Lockwood, the guitarist in her band, with Keough as the best man. In 2010 they moved to a mansion in Rotherfield, East Sussex, not far from the Scientology church’s headquarters. In 2012 she released a third album, Storm and Grace, a downbeat, more country album, produced by T Bone Burnett and reminiscent of Cash’s darker later work. 

She and Lockwood had twin daughters, but announced they were divorcing in 2016. Her divorce papers claimed she was $16m in debt, though in 2004 she had sold 85% of the Elvis Presley Trust, retaining Graceland and its contents. In 2018 she filed a $100m lawsuit against her former business manager, Barry Siegel. In 2020 her son, Benjamin, killed himself at her house in Calabasas, outside Los Angeles. She largely withdrew from public life, as if nothing more could be put into song. 

But in the week before her death she travelled to Graceland to mark her father’s 88th birthday, and then, with her mother, attended the Golden Globe ceremony in Los Angeles, where Austin Butler won the best actor award for playing her father in Baz Luhrmann’s movie Elvis. On January 12, 2023, at around 10:30 a.m., Lisa Marie suffered cardiac arrest at her home in Calabasas, California. Her heart was restarted after CPR was administered en route to West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles, but she died later that day at the age of 54. According to her autopsy report, Presley died of small bowel obstruction caused by a bariatric surgery she had undergone. 

(Edited from obit by Michael Carlson @ The Guardian & Wikipedia)