Born Free is a 1966 British

Cinema of the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom has had a major influence on modern cinema. The first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park, London in 1889 by William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. It is generally regarded that the British film industry...

 drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 starring Virginia McKenna

Virginia McKenna

Virginia A. McKenna OBE is a British stage and screen actress, author and wildlife campaigner.-Early career:McKenna trained as an actress at the Central School of Speech and Drama then worked on stage in London's West End theatres before making her motion picture debut in 1952...

 and Bill Travers

Bill Travers

William Lindon-Travers was an English actor, screenwriter, director and an animal rights activist, known professionally as Bill Travers.-Life and career:...

 as Joy

Joy Adamson

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...

 and George Adamson

George Adamson

George Adamson , also known as the "Baba ya Simba" , was a British wildlife conservationist and author...

, a real-life couple who raised Elsa the Lioness

Elsa the lioness

Elsa the lioness was raised by game warden George Adamson and his wife Joy Adamson in Kenya. Elsa and her two sisters, 'Big One' and 'Lustica', first came under the care of the Adamsons when only a few weeks old. They had become orphaned when George was reluctantly forced to kill their mother...

, an orphaned lion cub, to adulthood, and released her into the wilds of Kenya

Kenya

Kenya , officially known as the Republic of Kenya, is a country in East Africa that lies on the equator, with the Indian Ocean to its south-east...

. The movie was produced by Open Road Films Ltd. and Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...

. The screenplay, written by blacklisted Hollywood writer Lester Cole

Lester Cole

Lester Cole was an American screenwriter.Born in New York City, Lester Cole began his career as an actor but soon turned to screenwriting. His first work was "If I had a Million." In 1933, he joined with John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz to establish the Writers Guild of America.In 1934, Cole...

 (under the pseudonym "Gerald L.C. Copley"), was based upon Joy Adamson's 1960 non-fictional book Born Free.