Calabasas, California – Lisa Marie Presley has died after suffering a cardiac arrest at her home in Calabasas, Calif., on Thursday morning. The singer-songwriter, humanitarian, and only child of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Elvis Presley was 20 days shy of her 55th birthday.
Lisa Marie was found unresponsive by her housekeeper on Thursday morning. 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 attacks at young ages, respectively at 42 and 46.
Lisa Marie Presley was born in Memphis on Feb. 1, 1968, exactly nine months after her parents’ wedding. She had a tough childhood, with her parents divorcing when she was age 4 and her father dying when she was 9.
When Elvis Presley died in 1977, Lisa Marie became a joint heir to his estate, along with her grandfather and great-grandmother. At that point the estate was only worth a reported $5 million; however, Priscilla, a trustee in Elvis’s will, was able to build that fortune back up to an estimated $100 million by the time Lisa Marie solely inherited the estate on her 25th birthday, in 1993. Lisa Marie was the owner and chairman of the board of the Elvis Presley Trust and its business entity, Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., from 1998 until 2005, when she sold 85% of the estate, not including Graceland.
In 2003, Lisa Marie launched her own rock music career, at the relatively late age of 35, with To Whom It May Concern. The album, which featured illustrious personnel like Billy Corgan, David Campbell, Jon Brion, Matt Chamberlain, Mike Elizondo, Abe Laboriel Jr., and Wendy Melvoin, went gold and peaked No. 5 on the Billboard 200 chart. It garnered mostly positive reviews, as did her next two albums: 2005’s Now What (which went to No. 9 and featured a cover of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry,” a seeming jab at the tabloids’ constant scrutiny of her personal life), and 2012’s T Bone Burnett-produced Storm & Grace (whose track “So Long” was a seeming jab at the Church of Scientology).
Lisa Marie was married four times: to musician Danny Keough from 1988 to 1994, to pop superstar and childhood friend Michael Jackson from 1994 to 1996, to actor Nicolas Cage from 2002 to 2004 (although they separated after just three months), and to music producer Michael Lockwood from 2006 to 2021 (they separated in 2016). She had two children from her first marriage, actress/model daughter Riley Keough and son Benjamin Storm Keough, and two from her fourth, fraternal twin girls Harper Vivienne Ann and Finley Aaron Love Lockwood.
In July 2020, tragedy struck the Presley family yet again, when Benjamin died by suicide at age 27.
