She’s been caught in the middle of a legal dispute that has all of Hollywood talking behind her back, something 33-year-old Danielle Riley Keough certainly doesn’t need. Although she managed to get the doors of the industry opened for her as the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, she has earned a place as a film and television star by working hard, in a career that is often risky both in front of and behind the cameras, which has left her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Miniseries and the Camera d’Or at the last Cannes Film Festival for her directorial debut in War Pony, in which she has worked side by side with her production company partner, Gina Gammell.
Although her name should make headlines because the new series she stars in, Daisy Jones and the Six, premieres on Amazon on March 3, she has made headlines for reasons unrelated to show business. First, due to the early death of her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, on January 12, at the age of 54, leaving her, along with two underage sisters, as the only heirs to the Elvis empire.
And also because of the lawsuit that her grandmother, Priscilla Presley, 77, has initiated, who was unaware of the corrections that Lisa Marie made in the trust that manages the assets of the music legend, with which she seeks to be able to decide with Riley how to handle the legacy of the king of rock. A millionaire estate that consists of the 15% that Lisa Marie kept from Elvis Enterprises, after selling the rest for about 100 million euros, as well as Graceland, the mansion turned tourist attraction that has remained in the hands of the family.
Life for her changed radically two days after attending the Golden Globes with her mother and grandmother, as a way of supporting the Baz Luhrman film, for which Austin Butler won the best actor award for having given life to Elvis masterfully on the big screen. Those close to the Presleys have publicly commented that the clashes between Lisa Marie and Priscilla were commonplace in the relationship between the two, but when the time came to go out and promote Elvis, mother, daughter and granddaughter made a common front.
Born as the fruit of love between Lisa Marie and bassist Danny Keough, Riley is the eldest granddaughter of Elvis and Priscilla, although for her the figure of the king of rock and roll was a mixture of legend and constant presence, since he died when Lisa Marie was a girl.
However, at home, fame was commonplace, since after divorcing her father, Lisa Marie briefly married first Michael Jackson, and then Nicolas Cage: “I have been photographed by the press since I was born, obviously now It’s much worse with social media, but when I was in elementary school, there were paparazzi hanging around my house. But my mom explained to me that it wasn’t bad, and that it was better to try not to attract attention. Everything that helped me deal with my own fame later,” he explained in an interview years ago.
Although she grew up surrounded by musicians, from an early age she realized that hers did not go through songs, beyond the fact that it was something that she did not do badly and that she enjoyed. Her fascination was cinema, although initially she did not think of being an actress: “I wanted to be a director. It was my passion, but coming from a family of musicians, it wasn’t that they didn’t support me, but they didn’t know anything about the subject. When I was 12 or 13 years old, I was filming all day, so my mother would ask her friends to edit my horror shorts. But one day I said I wanted to be an actress and my father opposed it. It scared them because it is a very hard profession and They were afraid that I couldn’t tolerate the rejection. But once they accepted it, they supported me in everything,” he explained then.
However, Keough started modeling when she was 15 years old and was successful enough to grace the cover of Vogue and walk for Dolce.
But in the first role she appeared for in the independent film The Runaways, she was cast, making her feature film debut alongside Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning. Her career continued to advance with supporting roles until she stumbled upon Steven Soderbergh, who cast her first role in a major blockbuster, Magic Mike, in which she played a stripper. And after her stint through the Mad Max franchise in the sequel Fury Road, she called upon her again, this time as the lead for the character that would transform her career. In the television version of The Girlfriend Experience, she played an escort who finances her law career with her encounters, the role for which she earned her Globe nomination.
Curiously, Keough recognized then that his upbringing had been very conservative, and that what had attracted him to the proposal was to explore facets of his own personality that he was unaware of: “They didn’t let me wear sensual clothes in my teens, and I wasn’t I see myself as a sexy woman, and strangely enough, I’ve never really liked women who are very sexual and who sleep with everyone, but I thought that if I played a character like that, I could get a different point of view, and that’s exactly what happened. I found out that each person has their own moral code and that you can’t judge others if it’s okay for them. It was a role I wouldn’t have imagined for, but Steven obviously thought otherwise,” he said in the presentation of the Serie.
She has been a constant screen presence ever since, starring in American Honey opposite Shia LaBeouf, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit, reprising Soderbergh in Logan Lucky, and starring in such prestigious films as Lars Von Trier’s House of Jack, The devil at all hours by Antonio Campos or the series The Terminal List in which he shared the bill with Chris Pratt.
Along the way, she met Australian actor and stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen whom she married in 2015 and had a daughter last year. And although he maintained close communication with Baz Lurhmann during the making of Elvis, giving him all the support he needed from the family, he never had any interest in joining the cast, which also included Tom Hanks: “The truth is that there would be no I was able to play my grandmother, and I’m the same age as Austin. And, above all, it’s too close a story for me to participate as an actress,” she said in a conversation with Variety at the last Cannes Film Festival.
