Joy Adamson was a naturalist, artist, and author best known for her book, Born Free, which describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. Born Free was printed in several languages, and made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. Adamson was born to Victor and Traute Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary , the second of three girls. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she went to live with 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". As a... young adult, Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine. Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. In 1956, Adamson's husband, George Adamson, in the course of his job as game warden of the Northern Frontier District in Kenya, shot and killed a lioness as she charged him and another warden. George realized that the lioness was protecting her cubs which were later found nearby. Taking them home, he and Joy raised the cubs.
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| Birthdate: | January 20, 1910 |
| Birthplace: | Opava |
| Date of death: | January 3, 1980 |
| Also known as: | Joy-Friederike Victoria Gessner |