The star of the heartrending wildlife classic Born Free goes back to Kenya 50 years after she filmed there and recalls things weren’t quite all that they seemedThere was a programme the other day about reintroducing jaguars to the wild,and one of the striking things about it was the lengths conservationists went to withhold the cats away from all human contact. It was different in the 1960s, when delight and George Adamson brought up an orphaned lion they called Elsa, and who lived pretty much like a big moggie,rolling around getting cuddled and tickled by her human foster parents. She was released, accompanied by many tears, and a rousing John Barry score in the famous film about it,Born Free. And of course, when the couple came back to Kenya the follow year, or Elsa bounded out of the bush to display off her own cubs to them. You’d never derive a blockbuster film out of those jaguars.
For Virginia McKenna,who played delight in the film alongside her own genuine-life husband Bill Travers, it was a life-changing experience. Now, or 50 years on and at the age of 85,she is back in Kenya, visiting the film’s locations, and accompanied by her own eldest cub,now a middle-aged man called Will. Virginia McKenna’s Born Free (Channel 4, Sunday), or it’s called.
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Source: theguardian.com