1989-present
Riley Keough News: Actor Completes Her Late Mother’s Memoir
Riley Keough’s mother, Lisa Marie Presley, was working on her memoir when she died suddenly more than a year ago, prompting the Daisy Jones & the Six actor to finish it for her. Presley’s posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, hit shelves on October 8.
Keough first agreed to help her mother write the memoir a month before Presley died from a bowel obstruction in January 2023. In the book’s introduction, the 35-year-old co-author revealed that listening to the tapes of Presley’s memoir interviews made her “burst into tears.”
“It was incredibly painful, but I couldn’t stop,” she wrote, according to excerpts shared with People. “It was like she was in the room, talking to me. I instantly felt like a child again.” From Here to the Great Unknown covers Presley’s struggle with substance abuse, her past relationships, her experiences with motherhood, and memories of her father, Elvis Presley.
Keough is set to discuss some of the details of the memoir in an exclusive interview with Oprah Winfrey, An Oprah Special: The Presleys - Elvis, Lisa Marie, and Riley, which airs October 8 at 8 p.m. E.T. on CBS. In an exclusive preview clip, she shared that her mother sensed something was off with Elvis the day he died.
“She said goodnight to him, and I think she knew, saying goodnight, that she had some kind of sense. I think she had a sense many times that he wasn’t OK,” Keough said. “You know, she would tell me that sometimes she would find him in his bathroom looking kind of out of it or holding onto the railing to stand up straight. And she also wrote these letters when she was little, saying, ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die.’”
Who Is Riley Keough?
Born into an American musical dynasty, actor Riley Keough is the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and the granddaughter of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, Elvis Presley. After getting her start as a teen fashion model, she made her film debut in 2010’s The Runaways. Her frequent partnership with director Steven Soderbergh led to a Golden Globes–nominated performance in the television show The Girlfriend Experience, and she has earned praise for roles in American Honey, Zola, and the 2023 series Daisy Jones & the Six, for which Keough contributed lead vocals in her Emmy-nominated role as a 1970s singer-songwriter.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Danielle Riley Keough
BORN: May 29, 1989
BIRTHPLACE: Santa Monica, California
PARENTS: Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough
SPOUSE: Ben Smith-Petersen (2015-present)
CHILDREN: Tupelo Storm
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini
Parents and Early Life
Born on May 29, 1989, in Santa Monica, California, Danielle Riley Keough is the daughter of musicians Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough and the eldest grandchild of legendary performer Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley. Keough never met the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, who died 12 years before her birth.
Keough was 5 when her parents divorced, and she and her younger brother, Benjamin, split their time between their parents, alternating between her father’s homes in Los Angeles and Hawaii and their mother’s Los Angeles home and Graceland, the Presley family home in Memphis, Tennessee. They also spent periods at Neverland Ranch, the lavish California home of singer Michael Jackson, who Lisa Marie married shortly after her divorce from Danny Keough.
Keough would later note that this upbringing, while hectic, had provided her with a balanced world view. As she told The Guardian, “I grew up very privileged with my mother,” she says. “But my dad didn’t live like that. And I think experiencing both sides has been helpful. My father had mattresses on the floor of his apartments. He lived in cabins and trailer parks. He just didn’t have much money.”
Following her divorce from Jackson, Lisa Marie Presley wed twice more, including a nearly four-month marriage to actor Nicolas Cage and a fourth marriage to music producer and guitarist Michael Lockwood, with whom she had twin daughters, Keough’s half-sisters, Harper and Finley.
Showbiz Interest and Modeling Career
Keough’s frequent travels made maintaining a regular school life difficult. She was eventually homeschooled and later dropped out of high school before graduating (a decision she later said she regretted). But she had set her sights on a performing career at a young age, writing and directing movies and plays at home that starred family and friends. Her parents, while supportive, feared the hazards of the entertainment industry, and Keough began modeling in her teens to support herself before beginning her acting career. She appeared in fashion shows for Dolce & Gabbana and Tommy Hilfiger and was named the face of Dior’s Miss Dior Chérie perfume in 2005.
Keough continues to model today. In October 2023, she became a house ambassador for Chanel and will be photographed for a 2024 spring-summer collection.
Movies and TV Shows: Mad Max, Daisy Jones, and More
Keough made her movie debut in The Runaways (2010), a musical biopic of the 1970s female rock band of the same name, where she played singer Marie Currie to Dakota Fanning’s Cherie Currie and Kristen Stewart’s Joan Jett. Additional work followed, including roles in the 2011 film The Good Doctor, then three movies in 2012: Jack & Diane, Kiss of the Damned, and Magic Mike, which marked her first project with director Steven Soderbergh. More drawn to indie films, Keough was initially uninterested in a part in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, eventually accepting a smaller role in the 2015 blockbuster starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron.
Keough had her first breakthrough role when she reteamed with Soderbergh for the first season of the Starz series The Girlfriend Experience in 2016. Based on an earlier Soderbergh film, the series starred Keough as a law school student intern-turned-high class call girl. She earned critical acclaim for her performance and was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Limited Series, Anthology Series, or Television Motion Picture. In 2017, Keough reteamed with Soderbergh a third time, for the comedy Logan Lucky.
A self-described “workaholic,” Keough kept busy after her Girlfriend breakout, earning a reputation for her skillful portrayals of middle or lower-class characters often on the margins of society, far from her roots as the scion of a musical dynasty. These included 2016’s American Honey, where she starred as a troubled runaway who joins a traveling sales crew (a role which earned Keough a Film Independent Spirit Award nod). Additional roles tackled other genres, including horror films like It Comes at Night (2017), The House That Jack Built (2018), and 2019’s The Lodge.
In a significant departure, Keough starred in Zola (2020), a movie based on A’ziah “Zola” King’s wildly popular viral series of 2015 tweets documenting the troubled meeting between two strippers. Having earned praise for her earlier naturalistic, more restrained roles, Keough went all out, sporting cornrows, spiky fingernails, an exaggerated “blaccent,” and highly sexualized performance as the troubled Stefani, who lures co-star Taylour Paige’s Zola on an ill-fated road trip to Florida in search of a big payday. As director Janicza Bravo told The New York Times, “She’s one of those actors who so effortlessly lands in the feet of her character that it almost seems like it isn’t acting.” The dark comedy earned numerous award nominations, including a Best Film nod from the Film Independent Spirit Awards.
Keough has also worked plenty behind the camera. In 2017, she formed a production company, Felix Culpa, with producer Gina Gammell. The company has several projects in development, and in 2022, the pair co-directed War Pony, a coming-of-age film which follows the lives of two Lakota Indigenous boys on a reservation. The movie premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival where it won the prestigious Caméra d’Or, awarded to the best first feature.
Daisy Jones & the Six
In spring 2023, just weeks after her mother’s death, Keough stepped into the spotlight for the release of her highest profile project to date, taking on the starring role in the Amazon Prime series Daisy Jones & the Six. A TV adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 best-selling book, the series charts the meteoric rise and fall of a fictitious 1970s rock band, whose turbulent personal relationships (inspired by legendary group Fleetwood Mac) threaten the band’s survival.
Despite hailing from a multigenerational musical family, Keough had little musical experience before starting the limited series but was determined to land the part as soon as she heard about it. As she told Vanity Fair: “I know I’m playing Daisy. I just knew it… I didn’t know if they liked me, I hadn’t even talked to them at that stage. The only other time I’ve experienced that is when I met my husband, and I knew a week in that I’m gonna have kids with him and marry him.”
Keough and the rest of the cast took singing and musical lessons, playing their own instruments on camera to recreate the fictional band’s Southern California–inspired sound. A companion soundtrack album, Aurora, with music featured in the show, was released in conjunction with the show. In July 2023, Daisy Jones & the Six received nine Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series or Movie and a nod for Keough for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
Under the Bridge
Keough returned to both the big and small screen in 2024. She portrayed real-life journalist Rebecca Godfrey in the Hulu limited series Under the Bridge, based on Godfrey’s best-selling book about the 1997 murder of Reena Virk in British Columbia, Canada. Keough also served as an executive producer for the true crime drama. “What an honor to be a part of telling Reena Virk’s story and to produce this series,” the actor shared on Instagram in April when then series premiered.
Elsewhere, she stars in one of the year’s most unique movies, playing a mother Sasquatch (in full costume) for the surrealist comedy Sasquatch Sunset. The Bigfoot-based indie flick, also released in April, co-stars actor Jesse Eisenberg.
Lisa Marie Presley’s Death and Estate Dispute
A series of tragedies struck Keough’s family beginning in 2020. That June, her 27-year-old brother Benjamin died by suicide, following a years-long battle with depression intensified by the spotlight and glare of the Presley family legacy. In the subsequent years, both Keough and Lisa Marie Presley publicly shared their grief over Benjamin’s death (Keough even trained as a death doula in an attempt to come to terms with the end of her brother’s life).
In January 2023, just days after attending the Golden Globes Awards ceremony where Austin Butler won the Best Actor in a Drama Motion Picture award for his portrayal of her father, Lisa Marie died from a small bowl obstruction at age 54. The singer’s death made headlines again when it was revealed that Keough’s grandmother Priscilla Presley filed a petition challenging her late daughter’s will, which had been amended in 2016 to remove Priscilla as a trustee in place of Keough and her brother. Presley questioned the authenticity of the document, which she alleged was filled with inconsistencies and was never formally witnessed or notarized.
Keough was reportedly deeply upset with the legal challenge and surrounding publicity. The case was settled, pending a judge’s approval, in May 2023. Priscilla Presley released a statement following news of the settlement, noting “I want to make clear that there was never any lawsuit filed against my beloved granddaughter. As a family, we are pleased that we resolved this together. My family and I hope that everyone will grant us the privacy we have needed to properly grieve Lisa Marie and spend personal time together.”
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge officially approved the settlement in early August 2023 and finalized its financial details later in October. Per the terms of the agreement, Keough was named the sole trustee of Promenade Trust, which controls her mother’s estate and the Graceland property. In return for withdrawing her petition challenging Lisa Marie’s will, Priscilla received a $1 million payout, and her adult son (and Keough’s uncle) Navarone Garibaldi Garcia, received a one-ninth share of the trust. Keough now also manages a sub-trust created to safeguard the financial interests of her two teenaged half-sisters. In addition, she agreed to honor her grandmother’s wishes to be buried at Graceland near Presley’s ex-husband, daughter, and grandson.
Shortly after this resolution, Keough served as an executive producer for Christmas at Graceland, an NBC television special featuring musical performances at the famed Tennessee estate in November 2023. She also worked to complete her mother’s unfinished memoir. Lisa Marie had approached her eldest daughter about writing the book together, and Keough agreed in December 2022, the month before her mother died. From Here to the Great Unknown released in early October 2024.
Net Worth
Following the resolution of her mother’s estate dispute, Celebrity Net Worth estimated Keough’s total fortune to be $20 million as of May 2024. Although it was reported that Lisa Marie Presley had spent much of her money, she retained ownership of Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate in Memphis, as well as a significant stake in the legendary singer’s intellectual property rights. Keough now shares that inheritance (along with partial benefits from a life insurance trust set up by her mother) with her two surviving half-siblings, twins Harper and Finley Lockwood.
Keough has also earned plenty thanks to her busy schedule and numerous film and TV paydays (including a reported $1.5 million for her starring role in 2023’s Daisy Jones & the Six).
Husband and Daughter
Riley Keough met Australian stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen in 2012, while filming Mad Max: Fury Road. According to People, the pair began dating the following year, became engaged in 2014, then married in 2015.
During the memorial services for Keough’s mother Lisa Marie in January 2023, Smith-Petersen read a message written by Keough, in which she revealed that the couple had welcomed a daughter. Born in August 2022 via a surrogate, Tupelo Storm is named after Elvis’ birthplace and has her late uncle’s middle name.
Quotes
- Rejection just makes me work harder to prove myself.
- At [age] 9, 10, 11, I was making movies all day, and I had a very practical mindset about it all for a child.
- I’m just generally trying to be grateful for everything at the moment, trying to operate in love and keep my heart open and give and receive love.
- I grew up with, you know, going to the grocery store, and my mom’s on the cover of all the magazines there. And, you know, there were photographers at my school... It was probably similar to how the Kardashians’ kids are growing up now.
- If you can take one of the most basic fears away, which is death, you’re living a much more present, fulfilled life. And then, therefore, you’re living.
- On her Zola role: Our thought process was if she is going to be this demon, then we need to really make her demonic. It was very collaborative. Trying to make her as awful as possible, as offensive as possible, and just truly going all the way.
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Barbara Maranzani is a New York–based writer and producer. She is a frequent contributor to HISTORY and Biography.com, covering American and European history, politics, pop culture, and more. In her free time, she enjoys planning and plotting her next travel adventure.
Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.
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