Will Travers Will Travers Will Travers is an English director and animal rights activist from Surrey, chief executive of the Born Free Foundation and president of Born Free USA and Species Survival Network. Son of English actors Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. Will Travers travelled with his parents to Kenya in 1963, when he was five years old, where his parents Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna were starring together in the 1966 true-life film, "Born Free" (1966), portraying conservationists Joy Adamson and George Adamson, who rescued a lioness cub called Elsa and successfully returned her to the wild. The experience led them
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