Bill Travers he played the title role in "Abraham Cochrane" which had a short run. Travers' most famous film role came when he played the conservationist George Adamson in the highly successful 1966 film "Born Free", about which experience the two co-wrote the book "On Playing with Lions". He co-starred with McKenna and the experience made him and his wife very conscious of the many abuses of wild animals in captivity that had been taken from Africa and other natural environments around the world. Travers received an offer to play a support role in "Duel at Diablo" (1967); during filming he broke
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