I've seen the movie Born Free several times and love it much. It's a beautiful story of love and devotion from human to animal and back again.
I believe several years ago when the real Joy Adamson died that they said she was buried next to her beloved Elsa. I can only imagine that Joy, her husband and Elsa must all be in a wonderful place together. Elsa was born free, but now they are all free and at home.
There seem to have been some wrinkles to The Real Joy Adamson.....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/kenya/story/0,,1143565,00.html
"Was Joy Adamson an angel of mercy... or a tyrant? The man who killed her 24 years ago now speaks out."
Highly strung and hot tempered? Almost certainly. Someone who would fire AT her employees? Almost certainly untrue.
Quite frankly, I would trust Ekai about as far as I could throw the Washington Monument. I think he's jealous and/or angry and is concocting a story... he comes off as someone who would play the victim.
Listen to the music of the night!
No reasonable person would consider the testimony of a convicted murderer to be even remotely credible.
shareConvicted murderers have been cleared due to advancements in DNA technology. Were the people who believed them "unreasonable"?
shareAnyone who actually believes Ekai, has never spent anytime in Africa. As for Joy Adamson (birthname is Friederike Victoria Gessner. Joy is a nickname given to her by her 2nd husband) goes, she would have had to appear ruthless, not only to acheive what she did, but simply to have survived in Africa.
shareI wouldn't personally use the term "ruthless" to describe the way Joy handled herself in Africa.
Consider that she lived when men were the ones 'in charge'. She as a woman living in a hard place, and in order to survive she would have had to be tough and hard boiled to not only garner grudging respect, but to make sure that those who worked for her actually followed her direction and listened to her. She cultivated a way of expressing herself that appreciated hard work and no time for the foolish or lazy.
I believe you are comparing how she lived in the past and in Africa to how women appear today in business and other positions of leadership and power have to handle themselves-forgetting it was women like Joy that paved the way for women to be "ruthless" and hard hitting in the 21st century.
It couldn't have been easy for Joy to model herself into a tough frontier like woman after living not only a different culture but opposite of everything she had ever known. Consider the era she was born into-1910! At the time she was born women didnt get the vote until 1918, at the end of WWI.
Below is a link to a few letters she had sent out to collegues and aquaintances, where you can read that she was anything but ruthless in her life(there are letters from George Adamson as well). I really loved reading them, and you can see the difference between her and her husband's personalities--he was warm and jovial, she was businesslike but very capable of being a loving person. It's pretty obvious that he let Joy handle the day to day business, leaving him free to be at camp in the wild.
http://www.fatheroflions.org/JoyAdamson_Letters.html
As to her name, she chose to be known as Joy Adamson after her last marriage, and I knew that she didnt use her birth name.
"a man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground" Sir Ernest Shackleton
shifty - you chose the right name for yourself. I'm guessing you yourself have a criminal history. BTW, your comparison makes no sense since we are not talking about someone who is innocent of murder.
share"No reasonable person would consider the testimony of a convicted murderer to be even remotely credible".
A convicted murderer could still be telling the truth about something. A propensity to murder does not preclude an ability to tell the truth.
The real Joy Adamson was SO NOT Virginia McKenna. Far from an English rose, she was from Silesia, and had already been married twice before marrying George Adamson.
And, this may be a myth, but I hear that Elsa was orphaned only because Joy had shot her mother.
I've never read that. Everything that I've read or heard states that George shot her mother in self-defense... and he was sorry that he was in the situation to do that, too.
She was definitely not Virginia McKenna... but Born Free is not the story of Joy's life. It is the story of Elsa's. I don't think it is necessarily wrong for them to take creative liberties in order to tell the story. I don't think it changes the meaning of Elsa's story. What the Adamsons did is remarkable, and instead of focusing on their individual characters, the movie retold the story and did a wonderful job.
Virginia McKenna and her husband Bill Travers were so moved by their experience of making the film and working with George and Joy and they spent the rest of their lives helping animals, mostly those in captivity (and Virginia is still doing it).
Jesus loves me, this I know...
"Virginia McKenna and her husband Bill Travers were so moved by their experience of making the film and working with George and Joy and they spent the rest of their lives helping animals, mostly those in captivity (and Virginia is still doing it)."
Then why did they turn down the chance to do the sequel "Living Free"?
Then why did they turn down the chance to do the sequel "Living Free"?
My dad actually met both the Adamson's when he was a kid as my Grandpa and Grandmother moved their family over to Africa to teach. I took a trip to Kenya 7 years ago staying at lodges all over and Elsamere was one of them. My Grandpa slept in Joy's old room. Great place.
shareI met Joy a couple times when I was young, growing up in Kenya. She was not movie star material, though her written book was captivating. I had a class-mate who was the son of one of her ex-husbands -- though I didn't know it until I read her autobiography in later years.
I think I actually prefer the follow up movie to this one, "An Elephant Called Slowly," starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers as themselves. It is a docu-comedy about their return to Kenya after shooting "Born Free". They stay at a friend's cottage while he is away and meet a trio of elephants. George Adamson makes a couple cameo appearances -- proving that he is *not* an Actor!
Very much a conservation film, made in Tsavo National park before animal numbers were devastated in the 70's.
Reading the jailhouse interview of Ekai, I was struck by the inconsistencies of his story and what the investigation discovered.
His claim was that after being shot he ran to his tent to retrieve a gun and shot her three times. He disputes the autopsy stating she was stabbed.
During the investigation, it was assumed she had been mauled by a lion based upon the condition of the body and what I am sure these investigators had seen in previous lion maulings.
When we consider the what condition her body must have been in to appear as a LION mauling, there is absolutely no way that one or teo or three gunshot wounds would EVER be mistaken for a lion mauling. Can you imagine how many times he had stabbed Joy that seasoned investigators would have mistaken her attack as a lion attack.
I am physically ill thinking of the level violence that Ekai used towards Joy when killing her. Keep in mind he has never denied killing her, and he is just a man trying to obtain a PAROLE, and will say anything to make it appear that he was "set up" about how Joy died.
Pretty clever of him to try and gain sympathy so that he is supported in getting a parole. If people look at the facts, he should remain in prison a very long time.
Oh and almost forgot--if Joy had really shot two other men, where are they... and after she was murdered, why didn't they step forward to back up Ekai's accounting of how Joy routinely shot at her workers and had covered up twice her assault on two of them?
Did you raise an eyebrow and go hmmmmmm?
"a man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground" Sir Ernest Shackleton