Elsa the lioness cubs. Elsa the lioness Elsa the lioness ( 28 January 195624 January 1961) was a female lion raised along with her sisters "Big One" and "Lustica" by game warden George Adamson and his wife Joy Adamson after they were orphaned at only a few weeks old. Though her two sisters eventually went to the Netherlands' Rotterdam Zoo, Elsa was trained by the Adamsons to survive on her own, and was eventually released into the wild. Her story is told in several books by the Adamsons, as well as the 1966 motion picture "Born Free". Elsa and her sisters were orphaned
Joy Adamson her grandmother. In her autobiography "The Searching Spirit", Adamson wrote about her grandmother, saying, "It is to her I owe anything that may be good in me". She grew up on an estate near Vienna, was educated in Vienna earning a music degree before studying sculpting and medicine. As a young adult, Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine. Joy Adamson married three times in the span of ten years. Her first marriage was to Viktor von Klarwill (aka Ziebel; 1902-1985). She went to Kenya in 1937 where she met and married in 1938 the botanist Peter