Elvis Presley spent plenty of time talking with Barbara Eden while they made the 1960 Western Flaming Star, but one subject went well beyond movies.
Presley was curious about Eden’s marriage to fellow actor Michael Ansara and wanted to know how two people working in Hollywood could keep their relationship intact. In a new Entertainment Weekly interview, Eden recalled telling him that acting had to remain a job.
The question was not entirely theoretical. Presley had already met Priscilla Beaulieu in Germany and told Eden about a young woman there whom he liked but worried was too young. Eden encouraged him to approach the relationship as a partnership, without realizing at the time just how young Priscilla was.
Presley and Priscilla eventually married in 1967, seven years after the conversations Eden remembers having with him on the Flaming Star set.
Elvis Wanted to Know How Eden and Her Husband Made Marriage Work
Eden had been married to Ansara for about two years when she began working with Presley. Both were actors, and Presley wanted to understand how they maintained a marriage while dealing with careers that involved location shoots, romantic scenes and long stretches of work.
“He asked me a lot about my marriage with Michael and how we did it, being in the industry, both of us,” Eden told Entertainment Weekly. Her answer was that acting remained work. “This is our job. This is how we make a living,” she recalled telling him, explaining that performers learn to separate what happens in front of a camera from their real relationships.
Eden had given a similar account in a 2022 PEOPLE interview. At the time, she remembered Presley asking more bluntly how anyone could maintain a Hollywood marriage with everything happening around them. The conversations also revealed that Presley was not asking only out of general curiosity. He had someone specific on his mind.
The Young Woman Elvis Told Her About Was Priscilla
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Presley had met Priscilla Beaulieu while stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army. They first met in September 1959, when she was 14. By the time Presley was filming Flaming Star with Eden in August and September 1960, Priscilla had turned 15 and was still living with her family in Germany.
In Eden’s 2022 recollection, Presley told her he had met a girl in Germany and admitted that he was unsure about the situation because “she’s awfully young.” He did not tell Eden her exact age.
Eden told him that if the two of them operated as a team, she believed they could make the relationship work. She later acknowledged that she had no idea at the time that Priscilla had been only 14 when she and Presley met. The two maintained contact after Presley returned to the United States.
Priscilla eventually moved to Memphis in the spring of 1963 to finish high school, and she and Presley married at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas on May 1, 1967. Their daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, was born on Feb. 1, 1968. Elvis and Priscilla divorced in 1973 but remained connected after the marriage ended.
Eden eventually met Priscilla herself. During Elvis Week at Graceland in 2022, she shared a photograph of the two together, decades after Elvis had first spoken to her about the young woman he had met in Germany.
Eden Remembers a Very Different Elvis Away From the Spotlight
The marriage conversations were only part of what stayed with Eden from making Flaming Star. She also remembers Presley as unusually considerate and committed on set.
Eden told Entertainment Weekly that Presley was consistently on time and would get her a chair if she arrived after him. She described him as having a “wonderful work ethic” and said she believed he was a genuinely strong actor.
That experience reinforced Eden’s long-held view that Presley’s dramatic ability was often overshadowed by his music and celebrity. Flaming Star gave him one of his more serious screen roles as Pacer Burton, a young man caught between his white father’s family and his Kiowa mother’s people.
The official Graceland history confirms that Presley filmed the drama in August and September 1960 with Eden among his costars. Unlike many of the movies that came to define Presley’s Hollywood career, Flaming Star was conceived as a drama with relatively little music.
Eden later saw Presley perform in Las Vegas and remembered the experience as thrilling. Her admiration for him remained tied not only to the performer audiences saw onstage, but also to the courteous young actor she had known on a movie set. Looking back on Presley’s death on Aug. 16, 1977, Eden told Entertainment Weekly that she remembered feeling deeply saddened by the loss of someone she regarded as both extraordinarily talented and kind.