() — Lisa Marie Presley, who died Thursday at age 54, was the sole heir to her father Elvis’s estate, as well as his grand Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee.
However, her father’s powerful artistic legacy did not deter her from her desire to pursue a career of her own in music.
Lisa Marie launched her career in 2003 with a debut studio album called “To Whom It May Concern,” which reached No. 5 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart and was certified gold that summer. She herself wrote almost all the lyrics on the album and co-wrote all the melodies.
At the time, Lisa Marie told Larry King that he had to move on from feeling pressured and constantly comparing himself to his legendary father.
“If I had been thinking about it, worrying about it, which I did for a long time, I never would have done what I had to innately give in my heart, in my soul,” he said. “So I had to stop worrying about it, otherwise it would have been too intimidating.”
Also around the same time, Lisa Marie pondered whether her name fame was a hindrance or a help, telling Playboy magazine that she never asked “the tabloids to be hounded every week.”
Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis Presley, has died at the age of 54
But, he added, “I would never give up any part of who I am or where I came from.”
“I would never want to be anything else,” he said. “I feel honored and proud of my family and my dad.”
That first record was followed by two more albums, titled “Now What” (Now what) in 2005 and “Storm & Grace” (Storm and Grace) in 2012.
A life under the spotlight
Presley had been at the Golden Globe Awards Tuesday night, which he attended with his mother Priscilla to support Baz Luhrmann’s film “Elvis” about his late father.
In 2020, Lisa Marie Presley’s son Benjamin Keough committed suicide at the age of 27. Last July, Presley marked the two-year anniversary of Keough’s death in instagramsharing a photo of their matching tattoos on their feet.
Lisa Marie Presley, who was previously married to Michael Lockwood, Nicolas Cage, Michael Jackson, and Danny Keough, has three other children: actress Riley Keough, Finley Aaron Love Lockwood, and Harper Vivienne Ann Lockwood.
In September, Lisa Marie Presley wrote an essay for National Bereavement Awareness Day, in which she opened up about the loss of her son.
“My life and the lives of my three daughters as we knew it were shattered and destroyed by his death. We live with this every day,” she wrote. “Grief is something that you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, despite what certain people or our culture would have us believe. You don’t ‘get over it’, you don’t ‘move on’, period”.
