Keiko, the Free Willy star dies

Keiko, the killer whale star of the Free Willy films has died, it was announced today.

The 35ft-long, six-ton whale, which was 27-years-old, died after the sudden onset of pneumonia in the Taknes fjord in Norway on Friday afternoon.

His animal care specialist, Dane Richards, said the disease struck fairly quickly.

“We checked his respiration rate and it was a little irregular … he wasn’t doing too well,” Richards said. “Early in the evening, he passed away.”

In the wild, orcas can live an average of 35 years.

Keiko, which means Lucky One in Japanese, was originally found ailing in a Mexico City aquarium in 1993. He was rehabilitated at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, then airlifted to Iceland in 1998.

His handlers there prepared him for the wild, teaching him to catch live fish in an operation that cost about €427,000 a month.

Keiko was released from Iceland in July 2002. He swam straight for Norway, a 870-mile trek that seemed to be a search for human companionship.

Keiko first turned up near the village of Halsa in August 2002. He allowed fans to pet and play with him, even crawl on his back, becoming such an attraction that animal protection authorities imposed a ban on approaching him.

Nick Braden, a spokesman of the Humane Society of the United States, said vets gave Keiko antibiotics after he showed signs of lethargy, but it wasn’t apparent how sick he was.

“They really do die quickly and there was nothing we could do,” he said.

Braden added: “It’s a really sad moment for us, but we do believe we gave him a chance to be in the wild.”

David Phillips, executive director of the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation, said Keiko’s plight changed public perception of whether a whale could be returned to the wild.

“We took the hardest candidate and took him from near death in Mexico to swimming with wild whales in Norway,” he said. “Keiko proved a lot of naysayers wrong and that this can work and that is a very powerful thing.”

In the end, Phillips said, Keiko’s lure is likely to prove beneficial because “there was something about Keiko that wherever he went – Mexico, Oregon, Iceland – he captured the world’s attention.”

Keiko’s stardom came from the three Free Willy films, in which a young boy befriends a captive killer whale and coaxes him to jump over a sea park wall to freedom.

That launched an ongoing €21m drive to make Keiko the first orca truly returned to nature.