Keiko lived two lives: one on the silver screen and one off it. Both alerted the world to animal-welfare issues a dolphinaria, but it is not clear which of his two lives was the more incredible.
Rewind to 1979, when a two-year-old orca was captured off Iceland and ended up in a dolphinarium in Mexico City. Keiko then spent a decade in a small tank. In 1993, he starred in Free Willy, a film about a maltreated captive orca befriended by a small boy who is determined to set him free.
Willy survives a truck crash, leaps a harbour wall and swims off into the sunset with his family of wild orcas.
Back in the real world, the celebrity cetacean became the focus of an animal-welfare campaign, which spent an astonishing $7 million on new accommodation for him in the USA and then flew him to Iceland (he survived a crash-landing on arrival) to release him into the wild.
But in 2002, during a preparatory supervised swim in the open ocean, Keiko vanished, popping up again off Norway after swimming almost 1,6ookm. He sought out human contact and his health deteriorated. In 2003, he was found dead on a beach. It was a case of life imitating art but, sadly, without the happy ending.
This article by Stuart Blackman was first published by Discover Wildlife on 30 September 2025. Lead Image: The Good Whale podcast follows the story of Keiko, the first orca to be released from captivity back into the ocean. (Photo by Colin Davey/Getty Images).
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