Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of rock ‘n’ roll legend Elvis, has died at the age of 54, her mother has said.
“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.
Lisa Marie, also a singer, was rushed to hospital earlier on Thursday. US media said she suffered cardiac arrest.
“She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known,” Priscilla said in a statement.
“We ask for privacy as we try to deal with this profound loss.”
Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of rock ‘n’ roll legend Elvis, has died at the age of 54, her mother has said.
“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.
Lisa Marie, also a singer, was rushed to hospital earlier on Thursday. US media said she suffered cardiac arrest.
Her ex-husband Danny Keough, with whom she lived, administered CPR until paramedics arrived.
After her pulse was restored, she was taken to a nearby Intensive Care Unit and placed on life support, in an induced coma, with a temporary pacemaker.
According to TMZ’s sources, Lisa Marie had complained of stomach pains earlier Thursday morning, and her death was not a suicide.
Lisa Marie’s father and paternal grandmother also both died from heart issues at young ages, respectively at 42 and 46.
“She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known,” Priscilla said in a statement.
“We ask for privacy as we try to deal with this profound loss.”
Lisa Marie Presley was last seen in public on Tuesday night at the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills.
Accompanied by her mother, the pair were seen in tears as they watched the show, where Austin Butler won best actor in a film drama for his portrayal of her father in Luhrmann’s movie.
During an emotional speech, the actor thanked the Presley family for their help during the film.
“Thank you guys, thank you for opening your hearts, your memories, your home to me,” Butler said. “Lisa Marie, Priscilla, I love you forever.”
Days before her death, she had visited Graceland, the mansion owned by her father in Memphis, Tennessee, to celebrate what would have been his 88th birthday on 8 January.
Born in 1968 to music icon, Elvis and her actress mother Priscilla, Lisa Marie spent the first four years of her life at her parents’ mansion Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee.
Elvis doted on his daughter and even named his jet after her. But following her parents’ divorce in 1973, Lisa Marie went to live with her mother in the suburbs of Los Angeles, with regular visits to her father at his home.
It is the place where he died in 1977, at the age of 42.
She was just nine when her father Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, died.
Doctors said he died of a heart attack, which was likely brought on by his addiction to prescription barbiturates.
“I’ve dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of nine years old,” she wrote last August.
Perhaps not surprisingly, her teenage years were troubled.
In 2003, she told the Los Angeles Times that following her father’s death, her mother sent her to a series of private schools when “she began acting out and experimenting with drugs”.
“I was kind of a loner, a melancholy and strange child,” Lisa Marie told the newspaper.
“I had a real self-destructive mode for a while. I never really fit into school. I didn’t really have any direction.”
She became addicted to opioids and painkillers following the birth of her twin daughters in 2008, according to CNN.
She opened up about the addiction in the foreword for the 2019 book ‘The United States of Opioids: A Prescription for Liberating a Nation in Pain’.
“Many more people are suffering silently, addicted to opioids and other substances. I am writing this in the hope that I can play a small part in focusing attention on this terrible crisis,” she wrote.
She credited Scientology “with helping her break from drugs and start building some self-esteem”, saying the controversial church was “a form of self-help, self-discovery”.
“It’s not so much a God thing. It’s nondenominational. It offered answers to questions I had about life. In the most basic way, it’s like Humpty Dumpty. When I fell off the wall, they helped put me back together.”
She also had two children, Riley and Benjamin, with her first husband, musician Danny Keough.
Lisa Marie Presley, stepped out of her father’s shadow with her music, but experienced “more than anyone’s fair share” of tragedy and heartbreak in her life.
She was 52 when her 27-year-old son Benjamin Keough, killed himself in 2020.
Her second marriage was to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, in May 1994. They divorced in 1997.
Lisa Marie memorably appeared in his music video for ‘You Are Not Alone’ in 1995, which was oddly interspersed with what looked like intimate bedroom footage of the scantily-clad couple.
She told Rolling Stone magazine in 2003 she had been attracted by his mysterious lifestyle and wanted to protect him from allegations of child abuse.
Lisa Marie also said she was “not proud” of her brief marriage, which was so bad that by the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, the hostility between them was plain to see. She was left glaring at him from the audience as he performed a medley of hits.
“It just got really ugly at the end,” she said.
By the end of the 1990s, she felt able to try to step into the spotlight as a musician in her own right.
Although she had written songs during her early years, the pressure of being the King’s daughter had been an understandable deterrent to making her music public. There was so much to live up to.
In 1997, she performed a duet with her late father, singing on his 1968 track, ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’.
Then songwriter and producer Glen Ballard encouraged her to make solo music, co-ordinating a deal with Capitol, with a slated release for her debut album in 2000.
Her personal life was still fraught, however, with a 2002 marriage to actor Nicolas Cage, who won an Oscar in 1996 for the film ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ and starred in ‘Face Off’. They split after just 107 days together.
Her first album ‘To Whom It May Concern’ eventually came out in 2003, followed by two more in 2005 and 2012.