After signing up to one of the largest game-ranging courses in South Africa, Lee-Anne jumped headfirst into six months of intensive training, covering everything from a physical boot camp to the fundamentals of science and botany. Do they live in a house? How do they wash their clothes? I had absolutely no idea.”Īnd it didn’t get any easier when she got there.

I didn’t know how much money game rangers made, where they lived and slept. Knowledge of the realities of the profession eluded her. But it just tells you how difficult the situation was.”Ī big part of the difficulty was how much of her game-ranging dreams were caught up in fantasy. I just had a cornea transplant in March and so far I’ve got fifty per cent of my vision back.

“I actually broke out in shingles and very unusually I lost the vision in my left eye. Taking such a radical leap into the unknown was traumatic. A world away from the land of rampant, starry-eyed ambition. “It was obviously a very different life to the one I lead now.” Swapping billboards on Sunset Boulevard for packing heat in the African Bush, today Lee-Anne is a game-ranger and rhino conservationist with her own charity, Our Horn Is NOT Medicine.

“I was acting in commercials and doing modelling work, while working at the Chateau Marmont.” She laughs at the memory of moonlighting as an aspiring actor while cleaning up after celebs. “That’s where I learned to love the Bush.” But it wasn’t until she was 30 years old that she finally decided to make it home.īefore that, a life in Hollywood was on the cards. “We’d drive all the way from Cape Town in our Kombi and spend the week, and I’d always go back kicking and screaming because I wanted to stay,” she recalls today. Whenever she visited the lush safari paradise of South Africa’s Kruger National Park with her family as a teen, Lee-Anne Davis militantly protested ever leaving. As part of our ongoing series, How To Make It On Your Own, the tireless campaigner shares some words of hard-won wisdom. Now a prolific conservationist in South Africa, Lee-Anne campaigns to protect the threatened rhino population, routinely slaughtered for their horn, through her project Our Horn is NOT Medicine. Lee-Anne Davis turned her back on Hollywood to fulfil her life-long dream of becoming a game ranger. Now she's on a mission to save the rhino from poaching.

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