Product Description

Virginia McKenna starred in some of the most popular and enduring movies of our time, among them Carve Her Name With Pride, A Town Like Alice and the phenomenally successful Born Free, in which she and husband Bill Travers depicted the story of conservationists George and Joy Adamson and their reintroduction of Elsa the orphaned lion cub to the wild. With the multi-award-winning Born Free both actors were at the peak of their careers but the film and all it still stands for changed their lives. Its powerful message stayed with them and so began a lifetime s campaigning across the world to save animals from commercial exploitation, imprisonment in zoos and the loss of their natural habitat. At the heart of this autobiography is a call to respect nature and all that it provides. Despite an exceptional career in cinema and theatre, Virginia McKenna pushed aside the glamour of movie stardom, the West End and Broadway to focus relentlessly on her personal mission with the Born Free Foundation or the plight of orphaned children across the world. This book will inspire anyone who cares about the future of the planet and all the creatures dependent on it, including human beings. The Life in My Years is the inspirational story of an extraordinary life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13940 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-16
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 300 pages

Customer Reviews

Gripping read
I read this book over several days, often dipping in and out of. The book gave me a great "feel good factor" and I admire how she gave up the type of life she had to concentrate on something she loved so dearly. It makes you realise just how important life and animals are to this world. It certantly makes you think!! I great read for all the family. Very good.

A great companion read with Christian the Lion
A terrific memoir from a truly admirable woman. Virginia Mckenna was one of the best British actresses of her generation and yet she set aside much of her career to focus on her family and in later life devoted to her passion for animal welfare. Some incredible pictures in this book too - wonderful production job. I can't recommend it strongly enough - if you liked Ace and John's story you will love this.

Utterly wonderful, and a must-read for any animal lover
This is the best autobiography I have ever read. Beautifully written, compelling, and heart-breaking. I was moved to tears again and again as I read of McKenna's pain at losing beloved friends and family, and treasured animal friends as well.

For Born Free fans, this book has plenty of "behind the scenes" content. We learn how certain scenes were filmed, anecdotes from during the filming, and the fates of the lions used in the film. But Born Free is only a small part of McKenna's story. She writes at length of her theatre and television exploits, though this is never tedious and always interesting. Sometimes her work in television took her to extraordinary places, such as the Himalayas, and her descriptions of these are rich and vibrant.

The chapters on McKenna's work for Zoo Check, the organisation that later became the Born Free Foundation, are the ones that haunt me the most. Until reading this book, I had seen zoos as a necessary evil; now I see no reason for them to be necessary. McKenna's stance on zoos in staunch and unrelenting, as she writes of the many terrible zoos she visited, and the disturbed animals captive in them. "Don't you think a year of freedom is better than twenty in captivity?" she asks, after writing of the success of releasing into the wild three dolphins that had previously lived in aquariums in England.

Her passion for Nature, and her pain at seeing it raped so by humankind, is overwhelming. It is almost unbearable to read her words, of greed and ceaseless human cruelty. In the book are several of the poems she has written, and the one that stood out the most for me was one that talked of the seasons, then, the last two lines read: "They're cutting all the trees, Soon we won't know what the season is". I won't ever forget those words.

Much of the book is devoted to McKenna's passion for animals and nature, that's true, but no one should ever accuse her of loving them at the expense of humans. She writes lovingly of two African children she "fostered" (she gave them financial support, and sometimes visited them with gifts to help the family), and of the Gurkha campaign, which she was a staunch supporter of (I say "was" because that campaign's purpose has been fulfilled; indeed, McKenna writes this triumphantly, and it must have been one of the very last parts of the book written, considering how recently the campaign was won).

I recommend that every animal lover out there reads this. But there is a real tragedy to this book: those who need to read it the most will never, ever read it.