Elsa the lioness 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 on
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