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Presley followed Elvis into the music business, releasing her first album To Whom It May Concern in 2003. She seemed to have inherited his brooding charisma, sultry voice, full lips and taste for rock and blues, once admitting that many fans came to see her perform out of curiosity.
“First I had to overcome a pre-speculated idea of me,” she said. “I had to sort of burst through that and introduce myself, and that was the first hurdle.
“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.”
Presley underlined that connection to her father’s music by joining her voice to such recordings as In the Ghetto and Don’t Cry Daddy. She performed in Sydney in 2004 and 2014.
Elvis Presley with wife Priscilla and daughter Lisa Marie in a Memphis hospital four days after she was born in February 1968.Credit:AP
Outside singing and songwriting, Presley took on humanitarian causes, including anti-poverty programs administered through the Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation and relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina.
But she also struggled with addiction to opioids and painkillers and had four very public marriages that also became very public divorces – to Keogh when she was 20, then famously to Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage (the latter filed for divorce after four months), then guitarist-music producer Michael Lockwood.
With her first husband, Presley had two children: actor Riley Keough, who starred in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, and Benjamin Keough. She also had twin daughters, Finley and Harper, with Lockwood.
Behind the scenes: Lisa Marie Presley prepares for her show at Sydney’s Hornsby RSL Club in 2014.Credit:Wolter Peeters
Benjamin’s suicide at 27 in 2020 prompted Presley to write a moving essay about grief.
“I’ve dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of nine years old,” she wrote. “I’ve had more than anyone’s fair share of it in my lifetime and, somehow, I’ve made it this far ...
Lisa Marie Presley arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of Mad Max: Fury Road, starring daughter Riley Keough, in 2015.Credit:AP
“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 honoured every single day to be his mother? Who was so much like his grandfather on so many levels that he actually scared me? ... No. Just no... no no no no.”
Fans of the king of rock ‘n’ roll – and of last year’s film – may well be thinking the same thing after another sudden death in the Presley family. Just no... no, no, no, no.
With agencies
Beyond Blue 1300 224 636, Lifeline 13 11 14.
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Email Garry Maddox at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.