# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/gerald-durrell
# Generated: 2026-09-01T12:00:03.649Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/gerald-durrell"
name: "Gerald Durrell"
slug: "gerald-durrell"
description: "He turned a childhood on Corfu into a bestseller, then spent decades proving zoos could be arks instead of cages — breeding endangered species when the rest of the world still thought conservation meant display cases and popcorn."
tagline: "British naturalist and writer (1925–1995)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Gerald_Durrell%2C_Askania_Nova.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "United Kingdom"
  isoCode: "GB"
category:
  name: "Writers"
  slug: "writers"
profileType:
  name: "Writer / Author"
  slug: "writer"
birthDate: "1925-01-07"
deathDate: "1995-01-30"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
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  momentum:             0.1195144724556489
  historical:           24.17542
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     65
  profileCompleteness:  75
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
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  country:  null
  category: null
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platforms:
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born in British India in 1925, Durrell moved to England after his father's death, then spent four years of his childhood on Corfu before the war drove the family back. A 1946 inheritance funded animal-collecting trips to the Cameroons and British Guiana; his wife pushed him to write about the first journey, and The Overloaded Ark sold well enough to launch a writing career. My Family and Other Animals, published in 1956 after an expedition to Argentina and Paraguay, became a bestseller. By the late 1950s he'd shifted focus: he leased land on Jersey in 1959 and opened a zoo built for captive breeding and study, not spectacle, handing control to the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust in 1963. The institution lurched toward bankruptcy repeatedly; he kept it alive through books and appeals, finally securing the property outright in 1970. An alcoholic, he divorced his first wife in 1979 and remarried Lee McGeorge, an American zoologist; together they made television documentaries and co-authored The Amateur Naturalist, which sold over a million copies. He founded the Durrell Conservation Academy in 1984 to train others in breeding practice. Diagnosed with liver cance