If there were a classification to categorize the nepobabies (that popularized neologism to define the descendants of celebrities turned celebrities) from the hills of Los Angeles, the actress Riley Keough (Santa Monica, 33 years old) would occupy the first positions. The interpreter, granddaughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley and daughter of Lisa Marie, has been building her career as an actress for years, but for a time her name was a constant claim in the fashion industry. Descending from the Presley lineage was the master key that allowed him to debut at the age of 14 on the catwalk at the hands of Dolce & Gabbana. A year later she would model for Christian Dior, a firm that signed her for one of her perfume campaigns, and in 2006 for Victoria’s Secret. In record time, she achieved what many professional models do not achieve in an entire career, covers in the magazine Vogue included. Keough, yes, claims to be aware of her position: “I am very privileged. You know the story of moving to Los Angeles and taking three years to get an agent? I had it in a week ”, she acknowledged in 2017 in statements to the British newspaper Guardian.
In 2023, the series Daisy Jones and the Six (in Spanish Everybody loves Daisy Jones) has returned Keough to the media spotlight thanks to the leading role he plays in this fiction based on the best-selling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, broadcast on Amazon Prime Video and with Reese Witherspoon as one of the project’s executive producers. The daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough has shown that music and the sense of entertainment run through her veins. The 10-episode series is set in the 1970s and deals with the formation of a successful rock group, called Daisy Jones and the Six, whose members must deal with the ego and talent of their two singers. One of them is Riley Keough (Daisy Jones) and the other is British actor Sam Claflin (Billy Dunne).
In the story of Daisy Jones there is music, drugs and love triangles, a combination that has conquered the younger public, delivered thanks to the Show to the seventies music of groups like Fleetwood Mac, on whom it is said that the writer of the book relied on to imagine the history of the band. The last chapter ends with a concert dated in 1977, the year in which the group dissolves and the protagonist decides to abandon everything to recover from her drug problems. In the real world, it was precisely in 1977 when Elvis Presley lost his life after long years fighting addictions, a parallel with the king of rock that adds to others deciphered by fans of the series. For example, when Riley Keough plays the guitar in one of the episodes, he’s wearing the same belt that Elvis wore on stage. “It was the idea of the art department. They told me ‘we have a guitar strap that musicians used to use in the 1970s, including your grandfather’, and I was fine with it,” Elvis’s granddaughter recounted in Collider.
A fan phenomenon that crosses the screen
The Amazon Prime Video bet has become one of the hits of the season and the songs on the soundtrack, which in turn are the songs performed by the group Daisy Jones and the Six, in promising successes. In fact, one of the songs, let me down easy, has made history by becoming the first fictional song to reach number one in downloads on iTunes, Apple’s platform. Such is the fan phenomenon unleashed, that it is rumored if the band could ever tour in real life. At the moment, there is nothing confirmed in this regard and it seems difficult to be able to balance the agenda of the entire cast. It is also not known if there will be a second season, but what is clear is that the hard work of months has paid off. “The schedule on the show was crazy. We recorded for nine months or so during covid. It was difficult to deal with physically and emotionally, apart from coping with the loss of my brother. [el hermano de Riley Keough, Benjamin Keough, se quitó la vida en julio de 2020, cuando la producción de la serie empezaba a arrancar]Keough confessed in Collider about the intense recording, also made difficult by the Lyme disease suffered by the actress.
It is inevitable to link the name of Riley Keough with Elvis but the truth is that the interpreter never got to know her grandfather, who died 12 years before her birth. Whom she did treat very closely was Michael Jackson. After her failed marriage to musician Danny Keough, the late Lisa Marie went down the aisle with the controversial artist, to whom she was married from 1994 to 1996. Keough’s (and her younger brother Benjamin Storm Keough’s) childhood was spent among the impressive mansion of Graceland in Memphis, inherited by his mother after the death of Elvis, and his trips to Neverland, the famous ranch that Michael Jackson had in Santa Barbara. In an interview published in the magazine T Magazine, the interpreter referred to the ranch as a place “full of toys, animals and children. It was like being at Disneyland every day.”
Jackson wasn’t the only famous stepfather of the Keough brothers. In 2002, Lisa Marie married actor Nicolas Cage at a wedding in Hawaii, a fleeting love story that ended three and a half months later. Keough’s childhood cannot be described as normal – much of her education was at home instead of in schools – but she says that as a child she did not feel strange, although in her adult life her opinion has changed: “I think which was similar to what the children of the Kardashians experience today (…) I could not do normal things, ”he explained in Vanity Fair when asked about her childhood in the public eye.
After trying her hand at the fashion world during her teenage years, it was finally acting that caught her eye. She debuted on the big screen at the age of 20, with a role in the biopic the runaways, where he gave life to the music Marie Currie. The opportunity that multiplied her visibility in the industry came with the 2012 film magic mike, by Steven Soderbergh, the director with whom he has worked the most throughout his career. There he had a secondary role but important enough to participate in the promotion of the film, give interviews and go to red carpets. To strengthen his career, he tried to achieve, without success, star roles in titles such as snow white and the huntsman either The Hunger Games. In 2015 it was at the box office Mad Max: Fury Roadwhere she met her husband and father of her only daughter, an Australian specialist whom she married in 2015.
Leaving aside his participation in several blockbusters, it seems that he has found his place in the film industry and independent series. In 2016, she earned her first and so far only Golden Globe nomination for her role as a law student-turned-escort in the series The Girlfriend experience. Without getting involved in overly commercial projects, in the last decade she has chained one job after another trying to stay away from everything that surrounds the Hollywood universe that she knows so well. In her filmography there are outstanding titles such as american honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016), together with Shia LaBeouf, or Zola (Janizca Bravo, 2020), works that have earned her several nominations for different awards on the independent film circuit. In 2018 he put himself under the command of Lars Von Trier in the controversial psychological horror film jack’s housewith Uma Thurman and Matt Dillon.
Riley Keough’s Family Tragedy
Her favorable professional moment ―in addition to carrying out her work as an actress, since 2017 she has had her own production company called Felix Culpa, with several projects on the horizon― counteracts with a personal life hit by tragedy. Her brother Benjamin, who bore a strong resemblance to her remembered grandfather, took his own life in July 2020 at the age of 27. It was a blow to the family, which was still not on the mend when it faced the death of Lisa Marie just five months ago. The eternal daughter of the king of rock died on January 12 of a cardiac arrest at the age of 54. In addition to her eldest daughter, she left behind two teenage twin girls, Harper and Finley, the fruit of her marriage to musician Michael Lockwood, with whom she spent a decade, until her divorce in 2016.
Precisely as a result of the separation, Lisa Marie’s problems with tranquilizers and opiates, prescribed by prescription after her last childbirth and to which she had developed a great dependency, came to light. Just two days before her death, Elvis’s only daughter had attended the Golden Globes with her mother and the rest of the film crew. Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022), one of the great premieres of last year, with a collection of 288 million dollars and a success with the public and critics.
Confrontation with Priscilla
Lisa Marie’s death has started a bitter chapter in the life of her daughter Riley Keough. The distribution of the vast inheritance of the mother, estimated at more than 100 million euros —the magazine Forbes assures that Elvis Presley is the fourth celebrity that generates the most income after his death—, has been the trigger. According to information published in the US media, Priscilla Presley initiated a lawsuit to clarify a change in her daughter’s will that occurred in 2016. Now, grandmother and granddaughter have reached an agreement on the will and both parties seem happy.
Until 2016, it was Priscilla and Lisa Marie’s former business manager, Barry Siegel, who were listed as co-trustees, but that year an amendment was introduced that removed them in favor of Riley and her brother Benjamin. They would be the heirs to the Graceland mansion and 15% of Elvis Presley Enterprises, as well as Elvis’ suits, cars, prizes and other objects owned by Lisa Marie, according to what he points out. Los Angeles Times. After Elvis’s death, Lisa Marie was the only heiress, since her parents had separated in 1973. The relationship between granddaughter and grandmother would have cooled so much that, according to what was published in some tabloids, Riley could have prohibited entry from Priscilla to Graceland, where her daughter Lisa Marie, her grandson Benjamin and, of course, Elvis Presley also rest. Now, the waters seem to have calmed down. Priscilla herself has declared that, after the court ruling, her family is “closer than ever.” But we will have to wait until August, when there is another hearing scheduled, to find out if peace is really sealed.
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