The book and movie helped alter worldwide attitudes toward the value of preserving natural wildlife and habitat, and Joy Adamson was also among the first to call for a boycott of clothing made from animal fur. She wrote a book, Born Free, about raising and eventually releasing the lion, and the book became a best-seller, inspiring a hit movie and short-lived television series. Two of the orphaned animals were soon deemed healthy enough to be given to zoos, but George and Joy Adamson raised the smallest and weakest cub, which they named Elsa. He then heard meowing from the nearby brush - the lion was female, and had attacked because, unbeknownst to Adamson, he had been approaching her three cubs. In 1956, while working in the wilds of Africa, her husband was charged by a lion, and fatally shot the animal. Befriended by archaeologists Louis and Mary Leakey, she accompanied them on excavations in Kenya and Tanzania, and met George Adamson, a Kenyan game warden who became her third husband after she divorced Bally in 1944. Promptly divorcing von Klarwill, she married Bally in 1938, and he was the first person to call her 'Joy.' She traveled with Bally on several African expeditions as he collected African plant life, and she illustrated his botanical papers and gained some renown as a scientific illustrator.

On her journey to Africa, however, Fifi met and fell in love with another man, a Swedish botanist named Peter Bally, who worked at the Nairobi Museum in Kenya. In 1937 he sent his wife to Africa to find a suitable place for them to stay until the Nazi era's end. Instead she married Victor von Klarwill, an Austrian businessman who, being Jewish, wisely worried about the rise of the Nazis. As a young woman her interests wandered - she studied art, dressmaking, and metal crafts, trained as a classical pianist but eschewed performing, and planned to attend medical school but never took the entrance exams. She found the experience deeply troubling, and vowed to never again kill for sport.

A turning point in her life came as a teenager, when she accompanied her father's resident gamekeeper onto the estate's hunting grounds, and shot and killed a deer. Remains: Cremated, ashes scattered at Meru National Park, Kenyaįriederike 'Fifi' Gessner was born wealthy, the daughter of a successful Austrian architect, and she was raised on the family's sprawling estate. Location of death: Shaba National Reserve, Kenya Birthplace: Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary

The spotted sphinx joy adamson