Keiko the movie star whale spent most of his life in captivity, and when finally freed to the wild, he ironically preferred the company of people to whales.

Born off the coast of Iceland in the late 1970s, he was captured in 1979. He spent time in Marineland in Niagra Falls then to an amusement park in Mexico.

He achieved stardom in the 1993 movie Free Willy, in which a young boy coaxes a whale to leap for freedom over a sea park wall.

It became a surpise hit, leading to two sequels and a TV show.

When that moment in the spotlight was up, six-ton Keiko -- the name means "lucky one" in Japanese -- was sent down to Mexico.

He was rediscovered in poor health, and the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation had him moved to Oregon in 1996 where he was brought back to health.

Millions were spent teaching him how to catch fish and interact with other orcas.

Eventually, he was flown back to Iceland in 2002 to live free in the seas where he was born.

But he swam 1,400 kilometres to Norway. He never bonded with other whales and was reportedly afraid to swim under the ice.

"He spoke the language (of whales) but he just seemed to be confused," said Jeff Foster, whose Seattle-based group, Marine Research Consultants, oversaw Keiko's care in Iceland for three years before he was released in 2002.

David Phillips, executive director of the San Francisco-based 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," said David Phillips, executive director of the San Francisco-based Free Willy-Keiko Foundation.

"Keiko proved a lot of naysayers wrong and that this can work and that is a very powerful thing."

Keiko settled in near a small village of Halsa on Norway's west coast in August or September 2002.

Once there, he became so listless that his team started feeding him up to 80 kilograms of fish per day, and Keiko got handouts until the day he died.

The 7½-metre whale came close to small boats. He even seemed to like people swimming with him and crawling on his back.

This frustrated his trainers, who thought if Keiko were isolated from people, he would seek out the company of wild whales.

At one point, authorities asked people to stay away from him.

"He was like the family dog; he wanted to be next to you," said Mark Collson, a board member for the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

In December 2002, Keiko's caretakers directed him to Taknes Bay. It was a remote, deep area on Norway's coast alongside orca migration routes.

Keepers fed him there, but he was free to roam.

Orcas live an average of 35 years in the wild, and it wasn't clear how much Keiko's time in captivity -- or his reintroduction to the outside world -- contributed to his death.

Nick Braden, a spokesman of the Humane Society of the United States, said veterinarians gave Keiko antibiotics, but it wasn't apparent how sick he was.

The whale was checked, and when his handlers returned two hours later, Keiko was dead.

"They really do die quickly and there was nothing we could do," he said. "It's a really sad moment for us, but we do believe we gave him a chance to be in the wild."

Phillips said Keiko's legacy will be changing the notions of what is possible. His plight also raised awareness and increased research.

One change is that in Vancouver, as one example, Orcas are no longer kept in captivity.