She has been described as the “real-life Mowgli”, a child who grew up in the African bush. Her friends were the elephant, leopard and ostrich she played with in the sun-baked wilderness.

The extraordinary photographs of little Tippi Degré that appeared in last week’s newspapers tell only part of the story, however. It emerged this weekend that the elephant was a veteran circus performer and had featured in films and commercials.

Other animals photographed with the girl were orphaned creatures that had been brought up by humans on ranches. Linda, an ostrich befriended by Tippi, who is photographed perched on her back, lived on an ostrich farm. She was destined to become somebody’s dinner.

The star of several nature documentaries in France, Tippi’s story has only just been published in English under the title: Tippi: My Book of Africa, but her celebrity in the Anglo-Saxon world seems certain to grow.

The pictures of her with Abu the elephant – she called him “my brother” – a leopard named J&B after the whisky and various other creatures were taken by her parents, wildlife photographers Sylvie Robert and Alain Degré, in Namibia, where Tippi was born and lived for the first decade of her life.

Today Tippi is an 18-year-old student of cinema at the Sorbonne in Paris who “is trying to find herself”, according to Robert, who has parted from Tippi’s father.

“Like any young person, she needs to know who she is and what to do with her life,” Robert said in an interview.

Tippi’s African adventure may seem like a distant memory: many of the pictures were taken when she was six and suggest a waif alone in the wilderness or, as the book’s advertising blurb put it, “a child who made her home with the animals, just as Rudyard Kipling’s young hero did in The Jungle Book”.

Robert acknowledged that “a child in the bush, playing with a leopard, that doesn’t exist in nature”. But she defended the Mowgli comparison on the grounds that even if the creatures Tippi had played with were raised by humans “they are still wild animals”.

There was certainly no question of Tippi, who is also seen in a loincloth, being brought up by the beasts, the fate that befell Mowgli. She lived with her parents, albeit at times in a tent in the bush when they were filming. She came into contact with animals mainly when the family visited friends with large ranches. Among them was a cattle farmer with the leopard J&B, whose mother had given birth in a trap.

The leopard, Tippi explains in the book, had been fed with a bottle but had never been tamed. On one occasion he bit a local Namibian boy. “I played with him,” she writes. “He could feel that I was not afraid of him so he never attacked me.”

Randall Moore, a conservationist who specialises in the rehabilitation of elephants from safari parks, circuses and zoos, introduced Tippi to Abu. The animal had just been seen trampling a porter in the film White Hunter, Black Heart, directed by Clint Eastwood.

“Tippi fell in love with the elephant,” said her mother last week. “She was only one at the time, still in her nappies. Abu nuzzled her with his trunk and she was giggling. She had no fear at all. To see this child in front of an elephant like that was amazing. She didn’t notice the difference in size.”

Abu, who died in 2002 at the age of 44, appeared in numerous commercials and was skilled at complicated routines such as “rescuing” an actor from drowning.

Robert said that The Jungle Book, based on the Kipling story, had been Tippi’s favourite film when she was little. “She would jump up and down with excitement when watching it,” she said. “She looked like Mowgli’s little sister.”

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