Born Free Born Free Born Free is a 1966 British drama film starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers as Joy and George Adamson, a real-life couple who raised Elsa the Lioness, an orphaned lion cub, to adulthood, and released her into the wilderness of Kenya. The film was produced by Open Road Films Ltd. and Columbia Pictures. The screenplay, written by blacklisted Hollywood writer Lester Cole (under the pseudonym "Gerald L.C. Copley"), was based upon Joy Adamson's 1960 non-fiction book "Born Free". The film was directed by James Hill and produced by Sam Jaffe and Paul Radin. "Born Free", and its musical
Ben Travers English adaptation of Franz Lehár's 1923 operetta "Der Libellentanz". The music received mild praise, but the libretto did not. The piece ran for just over three months. Travers followed "The Dippers" with another farcical novel, "A Cuckoo in the Nest", published in 1922. Again reviewers praised its humour, and again Travers turned it into a playscript. The actor Lawrence Grossmith spotted the dramatic possibilities of this story, and he acquired the performing rights to the play. Before Grossmith had time to produce the piece, he had an offer from the actor-manager Tom Walls to buy the rights. Walls was in