It was Bally who gave her the nickname 'Joy'. She married Bally shortly afterward, in 1938. When her husband arrived in Kenya, Joy announced her intention to divorce him. Unfortunately, on the voyage there, she met Peter Bally, a botanist.

In 1937 Klarwill sent his young wife ahead to Africa. Her new husband, a Jew, decided that the couple should move to Kenya to escape the rising Nazi movement in Austria. Joy Adamson married three times in the span of ten years. As a young adult, Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine. She grew up on an estate near Vienna, was educated in Vienna earning a music degree before studying sculpting and medicine. 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'. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she went to live with her grandmother. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.Īdamson was born to Victor and Traute Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic), the second of three daughters. Born Free was printed in several languages, and made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name.

Her book, Born Free, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. Friederike Victoria 'Joy' Adamson (née Gessner, 20 January 1910 – 3 January 1980) was a naturalist, artist and author.

Forever free by joy adamson