The Presleys are finding in posterity the film career they never had. Elvis, who fought to be the new James Dean and had to retire with an uneven cast of notable films and titles that ranged from the saccharine to the discouraging, released last year the great feature film that he pursued in life. Thanks to Baz Luhrmann and a chameleonic Austin Butler who, months later, continues to carry the singer’s overwhelming tenor voice, Elvis was a public success that resurrected (did it ever die?) Elvismania: only in Spain, did it raise more than 4 million euros.
But that was Elvis’s story. Now, let’s hear, and see, that of Priscilla, the beautiful girl (fourteen years old) whom the rock star met during his military service in Germany. With Elvis, Priscilla was married for only six years. However, and despite the fact that she later married for the second time, the New Yorker has not renounced the Presley surname.
Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny play the Presley couple.Cinemanía
The half dozen years she spent with the tragic Graceland divo passed between infidelities on one side and the other (of course, Elvis won by a landslide), immense loneliness (Priscilla was not allowed to invite her friends to her house) and, finally, a divorce that both sealed by mutual agreement, before leaving the court holding hands like two lovers.
A decade after her divorce, Priscilla joined the veteran series Dallas to play Bobby Ewing’s fiancee. In 1988, two films related to the actress were released: the first, Grab it as you can, the irresistible comedy by David Zucker and Leslie Nielsen, in which Priscilla participates, as well as in the following two installments. The other film linked to the New Yorker had a more discreet premiere, skipping movie theaters and being born directly on television.
Priscilla Presley in ‘Grab it as you can’Cinemanía
Its title was Elvis and I, that “I” being Priscilla. This telefilm recreated the years of marriage between the singer and the future actress, taking Priscilla’s memories as a starting point. 35 years later, this book has once again served as support for a film, directed by Sofia Coppola and starring an almost unknown actress, Cailee Spaeny.
How did Cailee become Priscilla?
Well, in large part, thanks to Kirsten Dunst. The Oscar-nominated performer has been, for years, Sofia Coppola’s muse, but not a jealous one. Curiously, the first time Sofia and Kirsten met in a film was by pure chance: it was New York Stories, a triptych about the city painted by Francis Ford Coppola, who co-wrote his story with his daughter, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, who decided to count on Dunst. Both were, respectively, 18 and 7 years old at the time.
‘Priscilla’Cinemania
However, as soon as Sofia Coppola debuted as a director, she began to regularly turn to Kirsten Dunst, who has starred in four of her films. Coppola defines the actress as “a sister, so when she speaks, I listen.” In this way she justified, in an interview for Wto take Dunst’s recommendation for the role of Priscilla seriously.
The actress suggested the name Cailee Spaeney and, just a few days later, the director and the young performer were meeting in a cafe in New York. “Sofia took out her iPad and showed me several photographs of Priscilla,” Spaeney says in the same interview. “She said ‘I think you could do it’ and I felt like Kirsten had passed the torch to me.” Sofia Coppola had a new muse.
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2023-10-15 06:33:42
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