Dame Anita Roddick DBE
‘Queen of Green’
She was born Anita Lucia Perilli in Littlehampton on 23 October 1942 to Jewish-Italian immigrants who ran a café. They divorced when she was 9 and her mother then married Anita’s real father, her husband’s cousin Henry, who died shortly afterwards. 
She went to St Joseph’s Convent, Littlehampton, and then, failing the 11-plus, Maude Allen Secondary Modern. Rejected by the Central School of Speech and Drama she became a teacher at Maude Allen, but left to travel, working in Paris and Geneva, and spending time in Polynesia.
On her return she met Gordon Roddick at her mother’s Littlehampton nightclub. It was love at first sight. “I had a body that wanted children, so I seduced him”. They married in 1970 and lived in Littlehampton, running a B&B and then a restaurant. Their marriage survived Gordon’s decision to spend two years riding a horse from Buenos Aires to NY.
Crucially before setting out he helped negotiate a £4,000 loan to open the first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. Selling naturally based skin and hair care products, it pioneered the sale of cosmetics free from animal testing, and became so successful that a second shop soon opened. Body Shop had an informal style with staff calling the boss Anita, and combining profits with environmental responsibility.
As the face of Body Shop Anita’s bird’s nest hair, energy, outspoken views and individual dress sense were a publicist’s dream, but she knew her husband, who devised the franchise system and oversaw finances, was as key as herself. “He’s the do-er. I’m the dreamer,” she said.
In the 1980s Body Shop became a leading retailer and Roddick a star, being named Business Woman of the Year, honoured by universities and appointed OBE. She was the UK’s most famous businesswoman and Body Shop had over 2,100 branches in 55 countries. In 1985 it floated and by 1990 she was the UK’s fourth richest woman.
In the 1990s US trading problems and attacks on its ethics hurt Body Shop’s share price and led to Roddick’s statement that financiers were “pin-striped dinosaurs”. But it survived and in 2006 was sold to L’Oréal for £652 million. There were accusations she had sold out to a company with a record of animal testing and which led an industry she had described as “a monster selling unattainable dreams, one that lies, cheats and exploits women”; she claimed that Body Shop could act as a “Trojan horse”.
The Roddicks made £130 million, of which £30 million went to a philanthropic foundation. She thought it wrong to die rich and gave tirelessly of her time, energy and money to charitable commitments. Anita Roddick was a committed green, left-leaning activist. At Body Shop tills customers would find pamphlets on Aids awareness, Third World Aid and homelessness. She helped set up the Big Issue, and was involved in Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, Shelter and CND. In 2003 she was appointed DBE.
John Sauven of Greenpeace said “She was so ahead of her time when it came to issues of how business could be done in different ways ….. When you look at it today, and how every company claims to be green, she was living this decades ago.”
In 2004 she discovered she had contracted Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion. In 2007 she went public with this, becoming patron of the Hepatitis C Trust. Chief Executive, Charles Gore, said “Working with her was so joyful...she took all her causes seriously but never took herself seriously, which made her really fun to be with.”
She died after a stroke on 10 September 2007, aged 64.
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