KEY POINTS:
At her memorial service last year on the shore of Lake Naivasha in Kenya's Great Rift Valley, Joan Root's former husband did his best to try to sum up the contribution she had made to the series of ground-breaking wildlife documentaries the couple made years earlier.
"Many of
you know what a wonderful helper Joan was to me, but she was much more than that," Alan Root told the assembled group of conservationists, and film-makers sitting overlooking the lake.
"She was really the producer of all the films we did together. Joan was my right arm. She made it all possible. And if we flew high and far together in those years, it was because of her."
At that point Root, divorced from his former wife a full 25 years before, found himself unable to go on and dissolved into tears. His tribute would have to wait.
This week it was announced that another tribute to Root - murdered in her lakeshore farmhouse in January last year - was under way.
It was revealed at the Cannes Film Festival that Julia Roberts will play Root in a movie telling the story of her extraordinary life and her brutal death - allegedly a murder carried out in "retaliation" for her conservation efforts.
Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, who jointly head Working Title Films, said they got the idea for the film after reading a lengthy magazine article about Root's life last summer.
Roberts apparently read the same article and was equally moved by the story of Root's efforts to try to preserve Africa's threatened wildlife.
"Joan made many films with her husband in Kenya before she was shot. Julia read the article about her and we came together with it," Bevan said.
"It is a story that we thought could make a great movie in terms of stretching from Out Of Africa to The Constant Gardener and with the issues that relate to the world today. We are thrilled to be making a film about such a courageous, adventurous and passionate woman. With Julia in that role, we hope it will be a movie that people will want to see."
Root was murdered on January 13 last year, in the bedroom of the property where the 69-year-old had lived for the past 25 years with a collection of orphaned animals and a staff of nine.
From the veranda of her house, set on 36ha, she could watch circling fish eagles and at night she could hear some of the lake's estimated 1200-strong hippo population march ashore and across her property.
But if her home, 90km west of the capital Nairobi, sounded idyllic, in reality, it was confronting severe environmental pressures.
In recent years huge flower farms have bought much of the lakeshore, using the water to irrigate the blooms that are exported. Officials say some of the farmers have been using banned pesticides which have found their way into the lake.
OF much greater concern to many - Root among them - was the proliferation of illegal fishers who were using close-meshed nets to land hauls of fish, many of them undersized. That lack of discrimination caused the lake to lose its ability to restock.
Root joined others to establish a semi-official action group called the Task Force to try to stop the poachers and to preserve the fish, which played such a vital part in the food chain of the lake. It was made up of government officials and former poachers who knew the lake, and Root was footing the bill to the tune of 4500 shillings ($62) a month for each employee.
The extensive magazine article in Vanity Fair magazine which inspired Roberts, the 39-year-old Hollywood icon, and the creative powers behind Working Title Films - which worked with her on the film Notting Hill - tells how the work of the Task Force gradually grew out of control.
Initially, it was successful in reducing the illegal fishing. But steadily the group's behaviour became more questionable. Some fishers claimed they were attacked and roughed up by the group's members and that they even stole their catches of fish.
Dodo Cunningham-Reid, a neighbour of Root's and whose upscale lodge, Hippo Point, is popular with the likes of Angelina Jolie, told the magazine: "Naivasha is the perfect microcosm for the larger picture of Kenya: lawlessness, poverty, collapsing infrastructure, corruption, abuse on all levels - the sad story of a displaced society where money talks."
As local support for the Task Force started to fall, Root's friends begged her to drop her links to the group and eventually she stopped paying its members to act against the poachers. Police believe that was her downfall.
Suddenly she started receiving death threats and warnings by text message.
Former members of the Task Force, reduced from positions of authority to scrabbling once again to make a living, were not happy.
"Her dedication to conservation of wildlife was unbelievable," said Barry Gamer, a neighbour and fellow conservationist who is president of the Nakuru Wildlife Conservancy, told the New York Times. "She was tireless at it. She never gave up."
Root had dealt with plenty of challenges before. The daughter of a former British intelligence officer-turned-coffee farmer, Root was born in Kenya in 1936. While working as a safari guide in the former British colony she met her husband to be, an amateur film-maker who had left London in search of adventure.
An obituary published in a British newspaper following her death noted that Alan Root had found the young woman "painfully shy" but had decided to continue pursuing her learning that she had hand-reared a baby elephant. "Before we were married she wore a monocle and so did I. Together we made quite a spectacle," he said.
The couple were married in 1961 - their honeymoon night in a tent was disrupted when Root was stung by a scorpion that had crawled inside - and over the next two decades they made a series of iconic films together that showcased the wildlife of Africa.
"She was completely fearless," Root said. "She dived with sharks in the Galapagos, and crocs and hippos in Mzima, and handled dangerous snakes as easily as kitchen utensils, all with a grin and a shrug that said, 'Anything you can do, feller ... '."
Among the highlights of their work was Mysterious Castles of Clay, narrated by Orson Welles, which showed the inner-workings of a termite mound. The film - in which they trained their camera on a termite mound and waited 30 days for the winged stage of the termite life cycle to emerge - was nominated for an Oscar in 1978.
Another film about the Galapagos Islands titled Voyage to the Enchanted Isles, was narrated by Prince Philip. Others included Balloon Safari, which followed their journey together over the 5800m peak of Kilimanjaro - the first such journey.
Police - who arrested four men over Root's murder but had insufficient evidence to bring charges - believe it was her love of wildlife and her stubborn refusal to back down in the face of confrontation that led to her death. The Vanity Fair article reports how, in the early hours of January 13, Root's security consultant, John Sutton, received a call on his mobile phone while in neighbouring Tanzania.
Root told him that there were men outside her door demanding in Swahili that she open the door.
"Okay, turn off your light, get on the floor, and get into the bathroom," he told her. Previously, at Sutton's suggestion, steel doors had been put in place in the bathroom for this very purpose.
Sutton called his team of guards at the farmhouse and then rang Root back. He heard her sobbing and then a volley of gunshots.
"She was saying, 'John, help' and then her voice faded away," he said. All the time he could hear the intruders shouting, "Open the door! Open the door." Reports say that by the time help got to her, Root - hit twice in the leg and once in the hip - had died from massive blood loss.
Alan Root is involved in the film project, which has yet to be given a name.
The script is written by David Magee, who received an Academy Award nomination for the film, Finding Neverland, about the life of the children's author, JM Barrie, starring Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp.
Roberts will co-produce the movie as well as starring as Root. Filming - shot on location in Africa - is due to start next year.
- INDEPENDENT
