Lisa Marie Presley, the singer whose blues-tinged voice carried across three albums and only child of Elvis Presley, died on Thursday at the age of 54.
“It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” her mother, Priscilla Presley, said in a statement, according to The Associated Press. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known.”
The announcement came just hours after her mother had confirmed she was rushed to a local hospital earlier Thursday. Presley had suffered cardiac arrest at her home in Calabasas, the L.A. County Fire Dept. confirmed to Rolling Stone. Just days before the incident, Presley attended the Golden Globes alongside her mother, Priscilla, where Austin Butler, who portrayed Elvis in the biopic about the musician, was awarded the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama. “Lisa Marie, Priscilla, I love you forever,” Butler said during his acceptance speech.
Born on Feb. 1, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, nine months after Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding, Lisa Marie was raised in the area before moving to Los Angeles with her mother following her parents’ divorce in 1973. As the daughter of one of the most celebrated artists in history, Presley forged her own career in music. She released three albums: 2003’s To Whom It May Concern, which was gold-certified for over 500,000 units sold in the United States, 2005’s So What, and 2012’s Storm & Grace. Throughout her work she paid homage to a man whose a style and tone forever echoed throughout the American soundscape.
On her final album, Storm and Grace, the raw country, folk and blues collection embraced her Southern roots and family name. The year it was released, she spoke with Rolling Stone about finding her roots as she got older. “I’m always feeling a bit like I need to fight and kick, I don’t know why. But all I ended up doing in the past by trying to do anything else was stepping and tripping on my own feet,” she told Rolling Stone. “It was always against myself and hurting myself, though I was thinking I was fighting other people. I had to go through those phases, I did. So then, yes, I’m not doing that anymore.”
Presley has been open about her health struggles in the past, including her sobriety journey after suffering from an addiction to opioids.
“You may read this and wonder how, after losing people close to me, I also fell prey to opioids,” she wrote in The United States of Opioids, referring to her father and ex-husband Michael Jackson, according to Yahoo. “I was recovering after the [2008] birth of my daughters, Vivienne and Finley, when a doctor prescribed me opioids for pain. It only took a short-term prescription of opioids in the hospital for me to feel the need to keep taking them.”
This is a developing story.
