About Joy Adamson
Friederike Victoria "Joy" Adamson (née Gessner; 20 January 1910 – 3 January 1980) was a Czech-born Austrian-Kenyan naturalist, artist and author. Her book Born Free, which describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa, was printed in several languages and made into an Academy Award–winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art. == Biography == Adamson was born to Victor and Traute Gessner (née Greipel) in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic), the second of three daughters. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she went to live with her grandmother in Vienna. 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". Adamson grew up on an estate near Opava in the village called Kreuzberg (now Kružberk, Czech Republic). With the outbreak of World War I, she moved to Vienna, where she earned a music degree before studying sculpting and medicine. As a young adult, Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist and in medicine. Adamson married three times in the span of ten years.
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