Priscilla Presley and Tinseltown: How Elvis’s Widow Built Her Own Hollywood Career

TLDR: After Elvis Presley’s death in 1977, Priscilla Presley systematically rebuilt her life on her own terms, training as an actress, spending five years on Dallas as Jenna Wade, becoming an unlikely comedy star in The Naked Gun trilogy, and rescuing Elvis’s estate from near-bankruptcy.

In January 2023, she lost her daughter Lisa Marie Presley. As of 2026, she is on a major speaking tour across Australia and New Zealand and remains the living steward of the Elvis legacy.

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When Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, the woman who had been the most famous wife in America faced an immediate and specific threat: being reduced permanently to a footnote.

Priscilla Presley had spent years inside the insular world of Graceland, defined almost entirely by her relationship to someone else. She left that world deliberately and built something entirely her own.

What followed was one of the more quietly remarkable second acts in American entertainment history.

She once described herself to a journalist as a “child-woman” and a “misfit,” someone people never quite knew how to approach. It was an honest self-assessment from a woman who had been molded by one of the most controlling relationships in pop culture history and spent the rest of her life figuring out who she actually was.

The Elvis Years and What They Cost Her

Priscilla met Elvis in 1959 when she was fourteen years old and he was stationed as a soldier in Germany, where her father was also based.

Two years later, her parents allowed her to move with him to Memphis, where she attended a Catholic girls’ school while her classmates were deciding which colleges to apply to.

Elvis took Priscilla, a complete innocent, and transformed her into his own vision of femininity: the architectural hairdo, the heavy black eyeliner, the flamboyant dresses.

What happened next is one of the stranger ironies of the relationship.

When Priscilla finally began to assert herself and appear as the beauty she is today, Elvis himself started dressing more flamboyantly, with his own pile of raven hair, stage makeup, and bejeweled capes.

He had become his own warped reflection of the image he had created in her.

Their physical relationship was also unusual by any measure. Despite years together before marriage, Elvis refused to consummate the relationship until their wedding night, a dynamic Priscilla later attributed to a combination of insecurity and the impossible weight of expectation around his image.

They finally married at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas in 1967, borrowing Frank Sinatra’s private plane to fly to Palm Springs for the honeymoon.

From that point, she later said, he began to self-destruct. The pharmaceutically induced fights, the days sleeping in rooms with blackened windows, the nights spent carousing with his entourage, the spiritual experiments and phobias.

By the time she filed for divorce in 1973, four years before his death, she had already spent years learning how to exist outside the world he had built around her.

Learning to Act, Learning to Exist

Before she ever appeared on a scripted television set, Presley had already been training her body for performance for years. During her marriage, she studied karate at Chuck Norris’s Sherman Oaks studio.

Norris later noted that her classical ballet background gave her an unusual physical advantage, allowing her to master high kicks and precise movements with what he described as notable force.

The discipline was less about self-defense than about developing a physical identity separate from the one she had inhabited at Graceland.

When she turned to dramatic training, the process was harder. She later described in her memoirs the intense fear and vulnerability of standing in front of peers in an acting class, trying to shed her public persona and develop genuine dramatic timing.

The anxiety was real and she worked through it methodically. Her first television credit was co-hosting the reality-adventure series Those Amazing Animals from 1980 to 1981.

Her formal scripted debut came in the 1983 television film Love Is Forever, in which she played a character named Sandy Redford.

That same year, something bigger happened.

Five Years on Dallas as Jenna Wade

In 1983, Presley auditioned for the role of Jenna Wade on CBS’s Dallas, the primetime soap opera that was at that point one of the most-watched shows in the world.

She later admitted publicly that she had never seen a single episode of the show before the audition and lied to the casting directors when they asked if she was a regular viewer.

Her charm and screen presence overcame the fabrication. She was cast.

The character of Jenna Wade was Bobby Ewing’s childhood sweetheart, a sophisticated and self-reliant woman who had spent years living in Europe.

Presley joined the show in Season 7 and remained for 143 episodes, making her final appearance in the Season 11 finale on May 13, 1988. Her storylines over those five years included manipulation by the scheming Katherine Wentworth, a prior marriage to Italian Count Renaldo Marchetta, and the raising of her daughter Charlie Wade.

When Presley became pregnant in real life with her partner Marco Garibaldi, the writers incorporated her pregnancy into the script, and her character gave birth on screen to Lucas Wade-Krebbs before ultimately marrying Ray Krebbs.

One persistent claim in television databases is worth correcting here.

Some sources suggest that Sheree J. Wilson originally played Jenna Wade before Presley took over the role.

This is incorrect.

Sheree J. Wilson joined Dallas in Season 10 as April Stevens, a completely different character, Bobby Ewing’s second wife, who arrived years after Presley had already established Jenna Wade as a series regular.

The role of Jenna was actually originated by Morgan Fairchild for one episode in 1978 and then played by Francine Tacker for two episodes in 1980, before Presley took over from 1983 onward as the definitive version of the character.

Presley left Dallas in 1988 because she wanted to move to feature films. She felt a strong urgency to prove she could command the big screen, and she was right to back herself.

The Naked Gun and the Comedy Nobody Saw Coming

Before signing onto The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988, Presley had turned down the lead female role in a James Bond film, a part eventually filled by Tanya Roberts, because she was dissatisfied with the cosmetic, secondary nature of Bond girl roles and feared permanent typecasting.

She chose instead to audition for a broad slapstick comedy, which was a counter-intuitive move that turned out to be one of the smartest decisions of her career.

The film’s creator David Zucker later said Presley was nothing like the “Bride of Elvistein” he was expecting. Her co-star Leslie Nielsen described her as someone with a child lurking inside who wanted to come out and play, and said her life was like the Plaza Hotel.

Both men were trying, in their different ways, to describe the same quality: a natural warmth underneath the polished surface that made her impossible to dislike on screen.

The Zucker team operated on a strict casting philosophy for comedy: they wanted dramatic actors with no formal comedy training to deliver absurd dialogue with complete, straight-faced seriousness.

Although they initially pursued Bo Derek for the role of Jane Spencer, Presley’s deadpan delivery in auditions won her the part opposite Nielsen’s bumbling detective Lt. Frank Drebin.

The trilogy, comprising the 1988 original, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991), and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994), were massive international box-office hits.

Critics repeatedly praised Presley as an underrated comic actress whose deadpan delivery and chemistry with Nielsen provided the emotional grounding that made the chaos around her land. She was the straight woman in a world of lunatics, and she was excellent at it.

In August 2025, Paramount released a legacy sequel reboot of The Naked Gun, directed by Akiva Schaffer and starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. and Pamela Anderson.

Presley had expressed deep reluctance as recently as 2022, saying “you don’t fix something that’s already fixed” and noting that filming without Nielsen, who died in November 2010, would be deeply sad.

She ultimately agreed to a brief non-speaking cameo, appearing on screen during a chaotic New Year’s Eve sequence reacting in silent shock.

Her presence confirmed that Jane Spencer is Frank Jr.’s mother, bridging the classic trilogy with the new film. She also personally contacted Pamela Anderson to offer advice and support for taking on the female lead dynamic of the franchise.

Saving Graceland

While building her acting career, Presley was simultaneously executing what may be her most significant life achievement.

When Elvis’s father Vernon Presley died in 1979, Priscilla was appointed co-trustee of the estate alongside Joseph Hanks and the National Bank of Commerce.

At that point, Elvis’s liquid assets had dwindled to $8 million and the estate carried a $15 million IRS tax bill, largely the result of an exploitative 50% management contract held by Colonel Tom Parker.

She moved immediately on two fronts. She initiated legal proceedings against Parker for management abuse, eventually settling out of court in 1983 for $2 million and terminating his financial claims on all Elvis-related earnings. And she established Elvis Presley Enterprises to manage the estate’s corporate assets and licensing programs.

Her most consequential decision was opening Graceland to the public. Every estate lawyer and accountant she consulted told her not to do it. She did it anyway, partnering with local businessman Jack Soden, whom she hired as CEO, to open the mansion on June 7, 1982.

The $560,000 conversion investment was fully recovered within thirty days. Graceland went on to become the second most visited historic home in the United States, attracting over 22 million visitors and contributing more than $6 billion in economic impact to Memphis.

She also bought the real estate along both sides of Graceland on Elvis Presley Boulevard, opening stores, restaurants, and a theater over which she could exercise quality control.

She purchased Colonel Parker’s vast personal memorabilia collection to anchor a museum in Memphis. By the early 1990s, the estate had grown to more than $50 million, a 10,000 percent increase from when she took over.

She served as chairperson of Elvis Presley Enterprises and transformed a near-bankrupt estate into one of the most commercially successful celebrity legacies in history.

Personal Life and the Julio Iglesias Story

Presley never remarried after her 1973 divorce from Elvis. The two men who had entered her life before Marco Garibaldi both ultimately betrayed her trust.

Mike Stone, the karate instructor with whom she had an affair while still married to Elvis, sold his story to a tabloid. Mike Edwards, the model with whom she lived for several years afterward, wrote an expose of their time together.

During her years on Dallas, there was a brief entanglement with Julio Iglesias. He invited her to Chile to appear on a television show, and afterward sent flowers every day and love notes from Japan while she was traveling on business.

When she visited him at one of his Florida homes, he took her first to a recording session. Sitting there, surrounded by the machinery of another larger-than-life entertainer’s world, something clicked. She recognized the pattern.

This was not what she wanted.

At his house that evening she deflected his advances and made him sleep in an unfinished room he was building for his daughter. She woke at four in the morning, knocked on his door, and asked for a driver. He wanted to know what was wrong with his “leetle girl.” She told him she just wanted to go home.

The man she did choose was Marco Antonio Garcia, known as Marco Garibaldi, a Brazilian screenwriter she met through a costumer on the Dallas set. Their relationship lasted 22 years, from 1984 to 2006.

Their son Navarone Garibaldi was born on March 1, 1987. Presley reportedly required Garibaldi to sign a legal agreement upon entering the relationship preventing him from ever publishing a book about her. After Mike Stone and Mike Edwards, she had learned to protect herself.

Scientology and Lisa Marie

One significant aspect of Presley’s personal life that rarely surfaces in mainstream coverage is her long involvement with Scientology. She removed Lisa Marie from the elite Lycee Francais in Los Angeles and enrolled her in the Scientology-inspired Apple School.

During a difficult period in Lisa Marie’s adolescence, she placed her at the church’s Celebrity Centre International in Los Angeles, which functioned as a kind of residential support facility.

Priscilla herself was an active participant in the organization for years, though she spoke candidly in the early 1990s about aspects of its internal bureaucracy that troubled her. Lisa Marie, for her part, was unapologetic about her own involvement, describing it as a self-help philosophy that didn’t tell you what your problems were but helped you figure them out yourself.

Lisa Marie eventually left the Church of Scientology in 2012 after decades of membership, publicly distancing herself from the organization in the years before her death.

The Loss of Lisa Marie

She is the mother of two children: the late Lisa Marie Presley, born from her marriage to Elvis in 1968, and Navarone. She has four grandchildren through Lisa Marie: actress Riley Keough, the late Benjamin Keough, and twins Harper and Finley Lockwood. In 2022, Riley gave birth to a daughter, making Priscilla a great-grandmother.

On January 12, 2023, Lisa Marie Presley died suddenly at the age of 54. The cause was a small bowel obstruction, a delayed complication from bariatric surgery that led to cardiac arrest.

Two days before her death, Lisa Marie and Priscilla had appeared together at the Golden Globes in support of Baz Luhrmann’s biographical film Elvis.

In her 2025 memoir, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, Priscilla wrote in unflinching detail about Lisa Marie’s final hours. She described arriving at the hospital, recognizing that despite a machine-induced heartbeat her daughter’s spirit had already departed, and ultimately making the decision to remove her from life support after doctors told her Lisa Marie would have no quality of life and would remain in a vegetative state. “It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” she said in her public statement. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known.”

Where Priscilla Presley Is Today

As of 2026, Priscilla Presley is on a major international speaking tour across Australia and New Zealand, titled “An Audience with Priscilla Presley” and “An Evening with Priscilla Presley, Life After Elvis,” coinciding with the release of her memoir.

The live events cover her early days at Graceland, her marriage, her film and television career, and her journey through grief.

She continues to defend the Elvis estate actively. She is pursuing an elder abuse lawsuit against a former business associate accused of manipulating her into signing away key rights to her personal assets. She and the Elvis Presley Enterprises team recently blocked a fraudulent attempt by a dark-web scammer to foreclose on Graceland. She makes annual pilgrimages to Memphis for Elvis’s January birthday celebrations and August Elvis Week.

Following the settlement of a trust dispute after Lisa Marie’s death, Riley Keough was established as the sole trustee of the estate. As part of the resolution, it was confirmed that Priscilla will eventually be buried in the Meditation Garden at Graceland near Elvis.

She started the post-Graceland chapter of her life determined not to be a footnote. More than four decades later, she remains the most consequential figure in the management of the most famous musical legacy in American history.

Fans have long been curious about her changing appearance over the years. That story is covered here.

For more on the Dallas cast she was part of, including Larry Hagman’s life as J.R. Ewing and why Victoria Principal left the show, those pages have the full stories.