Did Elvis indoctrinate me? Probably — but I don’t see it as a bad thing

She likes to keep herself on her toes. And British people like watching iconic American women of a certain age star in their pantomimes, I suggest. “Linda Gray,” Priscilla confirms. Has it become a thing? Willing the Americans to fail? “I don’t think about things like that,” says Priscilla, who enjoys a positive mindset. “I think maybe they’re coming to see what we have to offer. Can we actually pull it off?”

She met Elvis at a party at his house in Bad Nauheim, Germany — she was 14. Her biological father had been killed in a plane crash when Priscilla was just six months old. Her mother remarried — an air force officer — which is how, after spells in New Mexico, Maine and Texas, the family found themselves stationed in Germany, where Presley was serving in the army. Still a schoolgirl, she went to stay, then live with him in Graceland. In 1967 they married — in Las Vegas’s Aladdin hotel, coincidentally, and under duress from her stepfather, according to some accounts; Presley had taken a minor across state lines, he might have faced a lawsuit if he hadn’t made good on his promise.

She took amphetamines and sleeping pills to keep up with his lifestyle. She put up with his reported infidelities. They had a child — Lisa Marie. Six years into their marriage, the couple divorced, destined to drift into ever more separate lives, had Elvis not died in 1977, only 42, leaving it to Priscilla to raise her daughter single-handedly. Lisa Marie “was there when he passed away”. Her mother immediately took her to Europe to protect her from the headlines, and “kept her very busy. We travelled and we went to places that she loved to go. And I had her go to a camp that she loved and learn horseback riding and make new friends. And then we would go back to Graceland all the time and she learnt, I think, to cope on her own, with the knowledge that I was there and that she could always talk to me.”

As executor for Lisa Marie, Elvis’s only heir, it was also left to Priscilla, if she so chose, to continue his legend by proxy. Looking at all that she has done with the Elvis brand over the decades, it’s debatable whether the King would have remained in the collective memory with such vividness without her. Graceland opened as a museum in 1982 under her guidance, a gamble that transformed the dwindling $1 million that had been left to Lisa Marie after his death into Elvis Enterprises, now a $100 million trust. It must be hard being married to an idol. To many of his fans, she’s Yoko to his John. They make fun of her fragrance lines, her claims of channelling Elvis’s spirit in business matters. “If Elvis were here,” she’s quite sure, he’d have recorded a 14-track album with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra — a posthumous collaboration released this year. But I think all Elvis fans owe her a debt.

She wrote all about her relationship, very frankly, in Elvis and Me, a fascinating autobiography, now out of print, probably deliberately so — her frankness, possibly inadvertently, raised questions about Elvis Presley’s moral character: how he moulded and controlled everything his wife did, including the music she listened to, what she wore, who she spoke to; and forbade her from having a career, despite offers from Hollywood.

Elvis’s manager wasn’t keen on the match — with Priscilla being 14 when they met, he feared there’d be a scandal like the one that had poleaxed Jerry Lee Lewis’s career after Lewis’s marriage to his 13-year-old cousin. Once Priscilla became pregnant, her husband withdrew from her sexually, she wrote. She began an affair with a karate instructor. A couple of months into it, Elvis asked her to meet him in his hotel suite. She writes that he, “forcefully made love to me . . . [as he said] ‘This is how a real man makes love to his woman.’ ” It’s an unpleasant anecdote, suggesting rape — she says now that she overstated what happened.

“It sounds a bit like he indoctrinated you,” I say, cautiously. But she’s unfussed.

“Probably,” she says. “But I don’t see that as a bad thing.” Bearing this comment in mind, there’s something logical about her commitment to Scientology.

Yet she’s of sturdy character. An admirable survivor, having been through the hoops over the years, having turned down the obvious option of a life lived not doing very much, milking her ex-husband’s legacy. She was expected to fade away — then she did Naked Gun, and everybody decided she actually had talent. Before that, she starred in Dallas for five years; her character, Jenna, completed the Bobby Ewing/Pam love triangle — Bobby would have certainly married Jenna, his first love, if Jenna hadn’t already been married to his brother/Bobby hadn’t gone back to Pam/Bobby’s alleged paternity of Jenna’s baby hadn’t turned out to belong to an Italian count.

In hindsight, she has made some wise choices.

“Well, I don’t know if I want to say it, but I was asked to do Charlie’s Angels. I didn’t want to be typecast, let’s just put it like that.”

Typecast as what?

“As just a woman who is, you know, just about getting the parts and having to be in bathing suits or having to . . .” she trails off.

Be the sexy girl?

“Right. Sexy girl. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. You know, a part is a part and many people have done very well with that. But I wanted to do different things. I wanted my career to be full of taking challenges.”

What else did she turn down?

“A James Bond movie,” she says. “I can’t remember which one.”

I bet her agent was tearing his hair out.

“You know, I don’t care how he felt about it.” She smiles sweetly again. Her exit from Dallas was perfectly timed — she ducked out of view before the dreaded dream sequence. The cynic would argue that only a washed-up actor says yes to pantomime. It’s actually rather brave. One or two of her actor friends in Los Angeles know what panto is and it “frightens them to death”. You can see how it might, for an actor used to multiple takes, a forgiving camera lens and little experience with live audiences.

Priscilla pronounces the word panto, pan-toh!, as if it’s some delicious small edible delicacy. It gives the word a whole new refinement. “I talked to the producer of the pan-toh!,” she’s telling me. “In fact it was about an hour and 15 minute-long conversation. Because I’d never heard of pan-toh! I’m not English.” The producer said “that it’s kind of interactive with the audience and somebody will say something or boo you, and then he’d say, ‘Booing is saying you’re really good.’ And you can interject something back to the audience. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh. I do like to take challenges and I do like to take risks.’ ”

The Elvis Presley described in her autobiography is a controlling man, moulding his young wife to his own specifications. He seems to have been uninterested, contemptuous, of anything that might have given his young wife independence. One can’t imagine he would have approved of her stagecraft. Did they ever discuss her future?

“You know,” she says, “we didn’t talk about that. I came from a close family of six children. I was a mother. At that time, women didn’t really go out and start working. When you had a child — and it was especially difficult living in the life of rock’n’roll . . . and I’m not complaining at all because I enjoyed being his wife and the mother of his child and raising my child. Anything I learnt was from him. Anything that I saw or appreciated was from him. Now it all makes so much more sense to me — experiencing life and being part of that world of entertainment and knowing the struggles that he had and really was alone in.”

Her next big Elvis project is a 450-room hotel, opening October next year; the Guest House at Graceland is described on its website as “classic elegance and modern luxury — friendly, refined and uniquely Elvis”.

Priscilla has had boyfriends and a son, Navarone, by a film producer, but she has been single for a while. Part of the issue is that Los Angeles isn’t the best place to meet a soulmate. “A lot of beautiful people come to Hollywood and there are a lot of choices,” she says. “So I feel that a guy could be with a girl and have a relationship, and here comes another girl walking by and their eyes are always floating. It’s a difficult town to survive in, in that way. This is what I keep hearing from women and from men: that it’s just difficult. And I think we — my generation, maybe — we’re at a time in our life when we look for substance. A lot goes into a relationship if it’s going to work. I don’t think people are willing to date or really drive it out. To take the journey.”

Is she? “Yeah, of course I’m willing. But I want someone to be willing too.”

It’s possible that some men would feel overshadowed by her ex. Some would say: “You’re not over Elvis, so I don’t stand a chance.”

“Maybe there’s some out there,” she says. “But I have a lot of men friends that, you know, it’s my choice, really, isn’t it?”

Aladdin will be her third panto. She has familiarised herself with the concept thoroughly. “Well,” she says, proudly, “this is an over 300-year tradition.” Back home, “we don’t have that cheeky sense of humour. It’s their loss, it’s truly their loss,” she says with great feeling. “I love the English humour, I love being over here, I’ve got so many friends here now. I’ve learnt to laugh, enjoy, get accustomed to the cheekiness, the bantering and I just think they’re missing out.”

Eight weeks in Milton Keynes, then it’s back home. I wonder if she won’t miss our dank weather back in the hot and humourless streets of Hollywood.

Priscilla Presley is starring in Aladdin at the Milton Keynes Theatre until Jan 10 (atgtickets.com/pantomimes/milton-keynes/; 0844 8717652)