Joan Root

MARRIED couples have long been the backbone of the wildlife documentary. In the 1950s the Belgian couple Armand and Michaela Denis were the most charismatic on land safari, while Hans and Lotte Hass ruled supreme in the oceans.

In Two in the Bush, Alan and Joan Root’s compilation film about themselves shown on Channel 4 in 1989, the viewer sees clearly how the marital unit provides the sympathy, easy companionship and moral reinforcement needed to film in often perilous conditions. In one scene, Joan, required to stare down a spitting cobra, has her spectacles spattered with venom.

While her husband was fearless in his documentary pursuits, Joan Root had a quiet, steadfast courage. “I don’t know what I’d do without Joan,” Alan said at the time. “I’d probably have to marry three women at the same time.”

Together they made ten films, broadcast in Anglia Television’s Survival series. All were notable for their fine picture quality, excellent storytelling and flawless research.

Joan Wells Thorpe was born in Kenya, her father having emigrated from Britain to be a coffee grower in 1929. She developed a love for the animals of the Rift Valley, the “paradise on earth” long favoured by white settlers. Alan Root arrived with his parents at the age of 9.

His interest in the willowy, blonde but “painfully shy” Joan was kindled in 1961 when he learnt that she had managed to raise an orphaned elephant calf — a task regarded as impossible when the animal is less than six months old. He decided that she was a “winner”, and so began an accident-prone but productive partnership. Their first notable film, Baobab: Portrait of a Tree put its subject in the full richness of its context, examining the life of every creature that came into contact with the tree and its neighbours.

They did not set out to show “nature, red in tooth and claw” in the manner that has almost become the norm for the genre. They did, however, have a penchant for drama and for bold storytelling. They made films, not studies or reflections, and these required pace and narrative. They had no qualms about using their own, tame animals for close-ups (dik-diks, caracals and hyenas wandered in and out of their home) or helping the action along if required.

The narrator Barry Paine recalls: “Their films were distributed in the US quite early on, and so had a very commercial aim. They went for high drama. It was the opposite of the BBC approach, which was just to wait for things to happen.”

Their stunning migration epic Year of the Wildebeest (1976) is narrated by James Mason. This was the first time the perpetual migration of 1.5 million ungulates had been properly recorded, and viewers were startled by the scale and violence of the story. Its drama was heightened by the use of cameras hidden inside tortoise shells as the wildebeest thundered over them.

The Roots won acclaim, too, for Mzima: Portrait of a Spring, which captured hippos underwater, unexpectedly graceful like slow-motion ballerinas. This project cost Alan Root a large chunk of his leg, and one hippo tried to get its jaws around Joan’s head — a tusk went through her diving mask.

They filmed the inside of a hornbill’s nest by painstakingly taking their tree apart, building a film studio beside it and shooting the birds through a glass panel. Similar attention to detail was required for their termite film, Mysterious Castles of Clay (1978), which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Their greatest adventure was probably Balloon Safari over Kilimanjaro, in which the Roots became the first to pass directly over Africa’s highest peak. The adventure involved near invisibility due to cloud, a blocked oxygen tube, a burner blowing out and an unintended landing in Tanzania where they were arrested as “astronaut spies”. Although more a home movie than a polished production, the documentary was questioned for its self-indulgence; the commentary at one point declaring: “Flying a balloon takes a bit of getting used to — but Alan Root is one of those naturally well-coordinated people who gets the hang of this sort of thing very quickly”. Alan was indeed the counterpoint to the ever modest and self-effacing Joan.

The Roots divorced in the 1980s but remained on good terms. Joan Root stayed at their farm near Naivasha, 90 miles north of Nairobi. There she continued to care for animals and campaigned to conserve the area’s wildlife and fish.

Gun crime in the valley has increased as more and more of the land is turned over to farming flowers and fruit for export. The population has grown from 50,000 in 1985 to 200,000 today, with many of the Masai objecting to the encroachment of outsiders, and black Africans unhappy at the resources taken by white farms. Joan Root had tried recently to prevent poaching in Lake Naivasha, whose fish stocks may soon be exhausted, but desisted when the struggle began to take an uglier, more political aspect.

She was shot in her bed by intruders in what appears to be an escalation of violence in the valley. Last July John Goldson, the British owner of the Crater Lake Lodge in Naivasha, was shot, and gun crime claimed 1,400 lives throughout Kenya in 2004.

She had no children.







Joan Root, film-maker and conservationist, was born in 1936. She died on January 12, 2006, aged 69.