Elvis Said No Amount of Money Could’ve Made Him Feel Good About His Film Career
Elvis Presley is best known for his music, but he had a substantial film career as well. He began acting in the 1950s and continued making movies all through the 1960s. Though not always critically successful, his films always drew audiences. This didn’t excite Elvis, though. He said that he never felt satisfied with his film career.
Elvis’ film career was a disappointment to him
Elvis said he initially viewed acting as just another job. Over time, though, he grew to care so much about it that it made him “physically ill” to not have any control over it.
“I didn’t have final approval on the script, which means that I couldn’t tell you, ‘This is not good for me,’” he said, per the book Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. “I don’t think anyone was consciously trying to harm me. It was just Hollywood’s image of me was wrong, and I knew it, and I couldn’t say anything about it, couldn’t do anything about it ….”
As a result, Elvis grew dissatisfied with his acting career. He wanted a chance to prove himself as an actor, but he remained in airy musical films, playing different versions of the same character.
“I had thought that they would … give me a chance to show some kind of acting ability or do a very interesting story, but it did not change, it did not change, and so I became very discouraged,” he said. “They couldn’t have paid me no amount of money in the world to make me feel self-satisfaction inside.”
Elvis grew embarrassed by his film career in the early 1960s
Unfortunately, Elvis began feeling this way very early in his film career. He showed promise in some of his first films — he was a particular stand-out in King Creole — but he quickly tired of musicals. In 1961, he met with publicity director Anne Fulchino, who helped map out his acting career in the 1950s. She said he seemed humiliated by his current film, Blue Hawaii.
“It was a while before he came over and talked to us, and when he did — you see at the beginning I used to call him Chief and I said, ‘Hi, Chief,’ and he just looked at me like he wished I hadn’t come,” Fulchino said. “We made some small talk, and then he said something like, ‘This isn’t what we had in mind at Klube’s [the German restaurant across from RCA, where they had drawn up their plan], was it?’”
Fulchino said Elvis seemed embarrassed to be on the set.
“He was obviously uncomfortable with what he was doing, he was frustrated and disgusted — it was all in his face,” she said. “The emotion I respected most was that he was ashamed of it, which meant that he knew better — but you could see that he was trapped.”
He had one major regret about his acting
If Elvis had more control over his career, he would have taken impactful dramatic roles. He told his barber, Larry Geller, that he regretted never taking a part that could have won him an Oscar. He felt people would not remember the frothy musicals he made.
“People aren’t going to remember me because I’ve never done anything lasting,” he told his girlfriend, Kathy Westmoreland, per the book The Colonel by Alanna Nash. “I’ve never made a classic film to show what I can do.”
Elvis made his final film, Change of Habit, in 1969.
