Elvis and the Nuns

by Gunther Simmermacher · Published September 19, 2022 · Updated September 19, 2022

Dolores Hart and Elvis Presley star in the 1957 movie “Loving You.” The young starlet left a promising acting career at age 25 to join the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. (CNS photo/courtesy of Ignatius Press).

This article is part of a larger feature on Elvis entitled “How Elvis Came to Sing the Hail Mary”

Elvis Presley appeared in 33 films — some better than others — and on celluloid he kissed an actual future nun and romanced a character who was a nun.

The future Sister was Dolores Hart, who would give up a promising movie career in 1963 at the age of 24 to become a Benedictine nun. She played Presley’s love interest twice, in 1957’s Loving You and 1958’s King Creole.

“I had no idea who Elvis Presley was,” Mother Dolores later recalled. “When I first met him, he was just a charming young boy with long sideburns. He couldn’t have been more gracious. He jumped to his feet and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Dolores.’ He and Gary Cooper were the only ones in Hollywood who called me that.”

When she knew Elvis, she recalled in 2013, “he wanted to do something with his career. He wanted to get rich and interesting parts. They never gave him that. They just kept putting him in one girlie film after the other.”

She gave Presley his first screen kiss, in Loving You, his second movie and first as a lead. Their first kiss is aborted as they are interrupted by her parents, whereupon Elvis sings the hit song that shares the film’s title. But at the end of the film — SPOILER ALERT — they kiss. In the quite violent King Creole, Hart’s character is in love with Elvis’ club singer, but resists his sly attempt at seduction.

Mary Tyler Moore as Sr Michelle and Elvis as singing Dr Carpenter in 1969’s Change Of Habit, Presley’s final feature film role.

During the filming of King Creole, Elvis spent much time holed up in hotels to escape the public hysteria around him. Sometimes Hart would sit with him. “Elvis would open the Gideon Bible, as that was the version placed in the hotel rooms. Whatever passage he’d open it to, we would talk about it. He would ask me, ‘What do you think of this passage?’”

Inevitably Elvis, the enthusiastic womaniser, asked Hart out on a date. She turned him down. In 2011, Mother Dolores was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary titled God Is the Bigger Elvis.

Elvis kissed a future nun in his first leading role, and in his final leading role, he was romancing a religious Sister, played by Mary Tyler Moore.

The plot for 1969’s Change of Habits concerns three nuns, preparing for their final vows, who are sent incognito to a clinic in a rough inner city neighbourhood run by a hip young doctor, played by Presley. Not realising that the lay missionary he is falling for is, in fact, a religious Sister, the doctor tries to romance her. She has reciprocal feelings but also a strong call to her vocation. They never kiss.

Change of Habit was intended as a vehicle for Tyler Moore, and it stands above most of Elvis’ very patchy movie career. Mary Tyler Moore, incidentally, was raised Catholic and, with her mother, once had a personal audience with Pope St John Paul II.

This article is part of a larger feature on Elvis published in the Southern Cross magazine’s August 2022 issue.