The woman behind The King

As Sofia Coppola's biopic Priscilla readies to hit screens, we look back at the early life and great love of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley.

In 1956, 11-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu was given a record she had little reason to suspect would reshape her world: Blue Suede Shoes.

"I liked Elvis but not as fanatically as many of my girlfriends," she would later write in her 1985 biography Elvis and Me. Yet three years later, when her father, Air Force officer Paul Beaulieu, took the family to a posting in West Germany, she joked to her friends that she was going there to meet the singer, who had just drafted to the same area.

Priscilla was an army brat; her mother, Anna, a former photographer's model. Her birth father, James Wagner, had been killed a car crash when she was just six months old. Priscilla herself would know nothing of his existence until she unexpectedly stumbled across an old photograph titled "Mommy, Daddy and Priscilla", a strange man holding her as a baby. Confronted, Anna explained that the man she called dad was actually her stepfather, having raised her since she was three.

Pretty, yet shy, she'd always been popular in her previous schools, even being named Queen of Del Valley Junior High.

Yet arriving in Bad Nauheim, Priscilla found it tough. For the first time in her life, she felt like an outsider; friends far and few on the ground. She was lonely. That was until she was introduced to Elvis.

It's unthinkable today that a 14-year-old girl's parents would allow their daughter to have dinner with the world's most famous rock star, 10 years her senior, at his home. Yet that is what happened after a chance meeting with an army buddy of the star's saw Priscilla gain a coveted invite.

Arriving through a gate thronged with female fans hoping for an autograph, "I spotted Elvis immediately," she would write in the book, which is now the basis of a new biopic of the woman who would become his wife 10 years later.