Born Free Foundation Born Free Foundation The Born Free Foundation is an international conservation and animal rights organisation based in the United Kingdom focusing on wild animals. It originated in 1984 as the "Zoo Check Campaign" by actors Virginia McKenna and her husband Bill Travers along with their son Will Travers and four associates. McKenna and Travers had been greatly affected by the plight of wild animals after starring together in the 1966 film "Born Free" which told the story of George and Joy Adamson as they returned Elsa the Lioness to the wilds of Africa. They appeared in several more films about
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