Riley Keough pays tribute to her grandfather Elvis and late brother with daughter’s name

Riley Keough has revealed the name of her daughter, and how the moniker pays tribute to her famous grandfather Elvis and her late brother Benjamin Keough.

The Daisy Jones & The Six actress welcomed her daughter with her husband, Ben Smith-Peterson, via surrogate last August. Smith-Peterson revealed the baby’s gender in January of this year during a memorial tribute at Graceland for Keough’s late mother, Lisa Marie Presley, who passed away on 12 January at 54 after suffering from a small bowel obstruction.

In a cover story for Vanity Fair’s September issue, Keough revealed that she and her husband named their daughter Tupelo Storm Smith-Peterson. The name Tupelo was initially a subtle family connection –Tupelo is the Mississippi city in which Elvis was born– until Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis movie came out.

“I was like: ‘This is great because it’s not really a well-known word or name in relation to my family - it’s not like Memphis or something,’” she said.

The Mad Max: Fury Road actress then continued: “Then when the Elvis movie came out, it was like, Tupelo this and Tupelo that. I was like: ‘Oh, no.’”

Her daughter’s middle name, Storm, is a tribute to her brother Benjamin Keough, whose middle name was also Storm. On 12 July 2020, Benjamin died at his home in Calabasas, California, at the age of 27. At the time, their mother Lisa-Marie said she was “beyond devastated”.

Tupelo’s birth was a bright spot for the actress amidst family tragedy and her ongoing struggle with Lyme disease. Despite being able to “carry children,” Keough said she believed the surrogacy route would be safer in light of “what [she] had going on physically with the autoimmune stuff”.

As for how she’s felt adjusting to parenting, Keough told the outlet: “I don’t think you ever can be a perfect parent, but I would like to be the best mom for her that I can be.”

The baby name news comes on the heels of Keough being named the sole trustee of her late mother Lisa Marie Presley’s estate after a Los Angeles Superior Court approved a settlement the Emmy nominee proposed in June. The settlement concluded her ongoing legal dispute with her grandmother, Priscilla Presley, over the estate, which includes ownership of Elvis’ lucrative Memphis, Tenessee estate, Graceland, which had passed down to his only child Lisa Marie in 1977 after his death.

The court’s ruling grants Keough authority over the sub-trusts of her half-sisters, 14-year-old twins, Finley and Harper, from Lisa Marie’s marriage to musician Michael Lockwood.

In light of the legal battle seeing a resolution after months of litigation, Keough spoke at length about the ripple effect Lisa-Marie’s death has had on her family: “When my mom passed, there was a lot of chaos in every aspect of our lives. Everything felt like the carpet had been ripped out and the floor had melted from under us.”

The actress also acknowledged that, amid the painful loss, her family had a lot at stake, and noted that it “took a minute” for them to wrap their heads around their “complicated” situation.

“We are a family, but there’s also a huge business side of our family. So I think that there was clarity that needed to be had,” she said.