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
Bill Travers Bill Travers William Inge Lindon-Travers (3 January 1922 – 29 March 1994) was a Special Forces Army officer, English actor, screenwriter, director and animal rights activist, known professionally as Bill Travers. Travers was born in Sunderland, County Durham, the son of Florence (née Wheatley) and William Halton Lindon-Travers, a theatre manager. His sister Linden (1913–2001), and her daughter Susan, became actresses. William Ingle Linden-Travers enlisted as a private in the British Army at the age of eighteen, a few months after the outbreak of the Second World War, and was sent to India. Travers was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant