Dame Anita Roddick

ANITA Roddick was born with a self-confessed strong sense of moral outrage to an Italian immigrant couple in 1942.

Brought up in Littlehampton, West Sussex, the third of four children, her innate radar for injustice was fuelled by reading a Penguin book about the Holocaust at the age of ten. She trained as a teacher and, after a spell on a kibbutz in Israel, worked for the United Nations in Geneva before following the hippy trail to Africa and the Far East.

Her mother introduced her to her Scottish future husband, Gordon, and she later described them as having an instant bond and they married and had two daughters, Sam and Justine.

Anita tried her hand at running a picture framing shop, a restaurant and a hotel before she began experimenting with cosmetics, creating moisturisers based on Beduin recipes at her home in Brighton.

The concept of selling her cosmetics originally came as a means to support her children while Gordon went horse trekking from Buenos Aires to New York. But sales soon grew.

The first Body Shop store opened in 1976 with the help of a 4,000 loan, a dingy shop positioned between two funeral parlours and painted green to hide the mould on the damp walls.

It sold 15 products, all with natural ingredients in plain jars that, in the early days, had hand-written labels and were refillable. Some were reflected by Anitas foreign travels and some from her mothers beauty habits during the Second World War indeed the early patrons were pensioners delighted to recognise old fashioned wartime style ingredients such as glycerine and beeswax.

We behaved as my mother did in the Second World War, she later said. We reused everything, we refilled everything and we recycled all we could.

Younger customers soon followed, drawn by her virtual market garden of fragrances and ingredients from cucumber cleansers to strawberry exfoliators at cheap prices while supporting her platform of rejecting animal testing and embracing ethical trading practices. The business grew to 2,000 stores in more than 50 countries with millions of customers and Anita was made a Dame in the Queens Birthday Honours List in 2003.

Crucially, she caught the tide of the just emerging green revolution and its demand for eco-friendly products. Through the shops, and in her own right, she championed a galaxy of causes from Third World debt to body fascism.

She characterised customers as: "Vigilante consumers. People who are bored to tears with retailing and all its pretence. They are ethical watchdogs who demand to feel not only in sympathy with the product and where its ingredients come from, but with the company that makes it. They are very aware and very powerful."

Proving that beauty could have an effect that was more than skin deep was probably her greatest achievement. She saw the shops and the company as a way of achieving her goal of social and environmental change, launching campaigns in shops and mobilising customers to reject animal testing on cosmetics, against child labour and exploitation in the Third World, supporting Fair Trade, Greenpeace, and human rights.

Over the years petitions were put by the cash tills and shop window displays were controversial, challenging and entertaining, tackling everything from sexism to ageism.

"Of course the company through the shops must make money and profit," she said. "But the main purpose is to work towards environmental and social change, and to promote the advocacy of human rights."

Her characteristic bluntness and irreverence made her a constant thorn in the side of the conventional cosmetic industry and kept her in the headlines.

"I have never felt that beauty products are the body and blood of Jesus Christ. You can find moisturising creams now that are more expensive than gold it's totally ridiculous, she once said.

"Nothing the Body Shop sells pretends to do anything other than it says. Moisturisers moisturise, fresheners freshen, and cleansers cleanse, end of story."

The Body Shop was valued at 8 million when it was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1984 and the City had never seen anyone like Dame Anita, a woman who dressed like a hippy and spoke of ethical trading. She was contemptuous of the City and its focus on the bottom line.

But the company quickly saw its value build up to around 300 million while Dame Anita and Gordon saw their paper value soar. By the mid-90s, the profit growth had slowed and, last year, Dame Anita agreed to sell the company to French cosmetics giant L'Oreal for 652.3 million.

She rejected criticism that Body Shop was getting into bed with "the enemy" because L'Oreal had not abandoned animal testing and said the sale was a chance to strike a fairer deal for the world's poor as L'Oreal wanted Body Shop to teach it about community trade.

It was reported that Dame Anita and her husband would bank around 117.4 million from their 18 per cent stake following the sale. But little did she realise that while she had riches in abundance, inside her lurked a lethal virus.

In February last year, she revealed she was carrying the hepatitis C virus, which unbeknown to her she had been carrying for more than three decades. The virus had been contracted through a blood transfusion after giving birth to younger daughter Sam in 1971, but had only been detected two years ago after a blood test.

Dame Anita, who announced she had become a patron of the Hepatitis C Trust, a UK charity she turned to for help and support, said: "I have hepatitis C. It's a bit of a bummer but you groan and move on.

"What I can say is that having hep C means that I live with a sharp sense of my own mortality, which in many ways makes life more vivid and immediate.

"It makes me even more determined to just get on with things."

She said she was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, one of the long-term effects of the virus and the entrepreneur pledged to increase people's knowledge of the virus, dubbed the silent killer because of the few and mild symptoms it causes.

But right up until her death from a brain hemorrhage on Monday evening, she continued to campaign against globalisation and global warming and give her money away to good causes through her Anita Roddick Foundation.

I wanted to do something useful with the money while I am still able to, she said.

Leading the tributes yesterday, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: She inspired millions to the (environmental) cause by bringing sustainable products to a mass market.

She will be remembered, not only as a great campaigner, but also as a great entrepreneur.