“Zoos should be phased out,” says Virginia McKenna. “I don’t believe in bumping off perfectly healthy animals. I wouldn’t do that. But if we really care about animals as a nation, it should be government policy. Now is the moment to slowly but surely start phasing out the captive situation.”
The British actress who made her name in classic 1950s films such as A Town Like Alice and Carve Her Name with Pride, before the life-changing experience of playing naturalist Joy Adamson in Born Free (1966), is now 90 years old, but she remains absolutely committed to the welfare of animals in captivity.
We’re chatting via video call. McKenna is at home in the cottage in the Surrey hills that she bought many years ago with her husband Bill Travers – who died suddenly in 1994. Travers famously played Joy’s husband, the game warden George Adamson in Born Free, and the couple, with their eldest son Will Travers, founded what later became the Born Free Foundation. McKenna is joined by Will, 64, its president. Our conversation ranges far and wide over McKenna’s film career and activism, but we begin by talking about the heart-wrenching documentary Free Billy, which she has just narrated for the new, not-for-profit online streaming platform Ecoflix.
Free Billy tells the story of the long fight to have a 36-year-old Asian elephant relocated from Los Angeles Zoo to an elephant sanctuary in Cambodia. Captured in the wild as a calf in Malaysia and beaten into submission before being transported to the US and then on to the zoo, Billy faced a cruel “elephant training” procedure when he arrived, which is captured in the film, with chains employed to pull his front and back legs agonisingly apart to force him to lie down on command. “I am still haunted by it,” says Travers.
Billy has spent decades in isolation, in a small concrete enclosure, where even the trees are hot-wired to stop him touching them, and he has developed “stereotypic” behaviours, such as rocking his head back and forth repeatedly. “He’s not able to see or feel anything except his confinement,” McKenna says.
Movingly, the film compares Billy’s life with an Asian elephant, Kavaan, who was moved to the Cambodian sanctuary from Islamabad Zoo, in Pakistan, after a court ruled that the zoo must close. There, Kavaan has been living in a forest environment, where his very similar stereotypic behaviours have vanished. “I guarantee if Billy had elephant companions, proper space and environment, it would not take too long for him to get rid of this rocking activity and be an elephant again,” McKenna says. “I dream that for him.”
Born Free may have set the actress on the path to conservation activism, but making the film in Kenya could have ended tragically before shooting even began. Out with Travers, following lions as they stalked a herd of Thomson’s gazelle, McKenna was knocked heavily to the ground when one of the lions pounced on her shoulders, breaking her leg.
Was she afraid for her life at that moment? “No, I was in [too much] pain to think anything,” she says. “But Bill had to [act] quickly because they came and stood and looked at me on the ground, and that’s quite vulnerable.
“He took his shirt off and wiggled it through the grass, and lured them away from me to the Land Rover, then came back and carried me to the Land Rover and put me in the front seat, and I was taken to hospital in Nairobi.”
It wasn’t the first time McKenna had starred in a film about Kenya. Her breakthrough performance came in Simba (1955), a drama about the Mau Mau Uprising, although all of McKenna’s scenes were shot at Pinewood Studios. It’s seen now as a propaganda film, in which British colonial settlers face treacherous, murderous rebels – made when the conflict was still ongoing, with some of the indigenous extras reportedly executed just days after filming.
“It would never be made now,” she says. “It was of its time, and I think it’s a bit dangerous to make judgments or criticisms about something that was made years and years ago… It might have had an influence on people to say that [colonialism] was a mistaken thing, and we had to move on and change. And that has happened. They’re the most wonderful people, African people.”
The film won her a contract in her twenties at Rank, the British film studio with the famous gong titles. Was being a movie starlet in the 1950s all it was cracked up to be? “Well, I wouldn’t say I ever was that. I wasn’t terribly into that world at all. I didn’t like all that other stuff – wearing this or that designer’s dress, attending endless co*cktail parties and social events – so I didn’t do much of it, which probably made them quite cross. I didn’t do the five films I was signed to do – I think I left them or they didn’t want me any more because I was so annoying.”
“I liked real things,” she adds. “Carve Her Name with Pride was one of the films I did with them and that was a highlight for me because it was a real person.”
Carve Her Name with Pride is still considered one of the great British war films. In it, McKenna plays the wartime special agent Violette Szabo, who was captured, tortured and executed by the Nazis at the age of 23, while on her second mission into occupied France. “I’m still very good friends with her daughter, Tania,” says McKenna. “In fact, she rang me last week.
“And on the film we had the incredible Odette Hallowes, she was a real agent in the war, and was in prison and all the rest. She was our adviser, and we became close friends until she died [in 1995], we never lost our friendship.”
McKenna was in her early sixties when she lost her husband, after almost 40 years together, a rarity among showbiz marriages. The secret, she says, was “profound love. And we shared a love of nature.” She remembers when they first moved into the cottage, planting a cherry tree in the garden, and sleeping in a caravan while a bathroom was put in.
The intervening years haven’t always been easy. “It’s difficult for any person who loses the love of their life,” she says. “He’s still with me. I feel him with me all the time, and as I’m getting ancient, I’m coming nearer to him.”
Had it been a hard decision for them to step away from acting in the 1980s to focus on activism full-time? “Oh, not at all. Because something in our real life was so powerful. If you’d shut your eyes and walked away from it, you’d regret it forever.” It has been a long and arduous struggle, she admits, but she retains hope in the young, “who really care about other creatures. They are influencing the grown-ups”.
When I ask her about the returning Netflix show Tiger King, she and her son point out that it has put the whole issue of keeping large carnivores on to the public’s radar – “we need to bring these exploitative facilities to an end”.
Free Billy is available to stream now on ecoflix.com
