Nepo-baby looks just like her 90s TV star mum as she cuddles a lion in Africa – but can you guess who she is?

The Irish Sun

19-06-2025

TV star Donna Air's daughter Freya Aspinall looks just like her mum as she cuddles a huge lion in Africa.
The 21-year-old conservationist is seen cuddling two lions in a recent video before releasing them into the wild with her dad Damien.
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Donna Air's grown-up daughter Freya is a conservationist
Credit: instagram/@freyaaspinall
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Freya has grown up around lions and gorillas in kent
Credit: instagram/@freyaaspinall
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She works for her father's conservation charity The Aspinall Foundation
Credit: instagram/@freyaaspinall
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Freya's parents Donna Air and Damian Aspinall
Credit: Getty
Freya works with The Aspinall Foundation, a charity run by her father, Damian Aspinall, and founded by her grandfather, the late John Aspinall.
Freya rests her head on a lion in one photo on Instagram, and penned: "My beautiful ZEMO on the day we released him in Africa. I can't wait to see him soon."
Freya spent much of her childhood surrounded by animals at Howletts and Port Lympne Wild Animal Parks in Kent.
She now boasts 1.5m followers on Instagram, where she shares videos and pics of her life, and she says conservation is in her DNA.
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'I grew up with animals and couldn't imagine my world without them,' she recently told the Financial Times.
'This is in my blood – I've always known what I wanted to do.'
However, she has inherited Donna's striking features and is also very close to her TV star mum.
It's been more than three decades since Donna shot to fame as a child star on
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She later swapped acting for presenting, landing gigs on shows including MTV UK and The Big Breakfast.
A string of cameo film roles followed before she participated in reality shows Splash!, Celebrity MasterChef and the tenth series of Dancing On Ice.
Amazing moment millionaire conservationist Damian Aspinall's wife meets the tender gorillas he bred in Africa
Donna, 45, is also known for having an on-off relationship for four years with Kate Middleton's brother
Freya's parents, Donna and Damian, were introduced in 2000 at a dinner party by their friend
Donna was 21, Damian 40, and their relationship and parenting style quickly made headlines.
Shortly after Freya's birth, the couple famously said they planned to place their baby in a gorilla enclosure at Howletts, allowing her to be carried off by a female gorilla.
The move was a tradition Damian carried out with his eldest daughters when they were babies.
In another video Freya feeds a gorilla snacks from her pocket.
She says: "Animals don't belong in a cage in zoos they belong in the wild. We hate zoos.
"Kifu is at our sanctuary because his wife's who are a little bit older than him need medical attention 3 times a day and wouldn't survive the journey back to Africa.
"Gorillas live in a family group, so it would be completely unnatural to send him alone and separate him from his family.
"It's the same as humans if we were sent away never to see our family again we would all be so unhappy.
"So for him we give him the best life possible sadly at our sanctuary but his 5 sons are happily free in the wild where they belong.
"It's important to highlight any animal that can go back to the Wild should go back to the Wild and those that 100% can't should be given the best life possible, but this shouldn't be an excuse for zoos to keep all animals behind a bars for their business."
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Donna and grown-up daughter Freya put on a glam display for a night out in London
Credit: Getty
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Donna shot to fame on Byker Grove, alongside Ant and Dec
Credit: BBC
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She was previously in an on/off relationship with James Middleton
Credit: PA