Mara the Lioness Mara the Lioness Mara the Lioness is an animal actor who appeared as Elsa in the 1966 movie "Born Free", based on the true story of Elsa the Lioness raised by George and Joy Adamson. Mara was born in the wild in 1965, a premature cub abandoned by her mother during a violent rain storm. She was found lying on sodden ground, caked in mud on the plains of Masailand by Samwel, an African game scout and Larry Wateridge. Sick with hunger and in a semi coma, she was taken to a nearby coffee plantation in Kenya owned by British
Jack H. Adamson by the New York Times. In 1974, Adamson and Folland published a biography of Sir Henry Vane the Younger, early governor of Massachusetts and central figure in the English Revolution. The book received nomination for the National Book Award. Jack H. Adamson Jack Hale Adamson (1918–1975) was a literary scholar, biographer, teacher, and university administrator. The son of prominent Idaho statesman William Lennox Adamson, Adamson was born in 1918 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and lived in the small town of Carey, Idaho. Born and raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he served a church mission