Anita Roddick, Body Shop Founder, Dies at 64 By SARAH LYALL Published: September 12, 2007 LONDON, Sept. 11 — Dame Anita Roddick, the crusading entrepreneur who used The Body Shop chain of cosmetics stores she founded to promote causes like ending animal testing and supporting the environment, died at St. Richard’s Hospital in Chichester, England, on Monday evening, her family said. She was 64. Skip to next paragraph Andreu Dalmau/European Pressphoto Agency Anita Roddick in 2005. Ms. Roddick, who had been admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit after complaining of head pains, died of a brain hemorrhage, her family said. A woman of fierce passions, boundless energy, unconventional idealism and sometimes diva-like temperament, Ms. Roddick was one of Britain’s most visible business executives, and not just because of the ubiquitous and instantly recognizable Body Shop franchises across the country. Working on behalf of numerous causes — the rain forest, debt relief for developing countries, indigenous farmers in impoverished nations, whales, voting rights, anti-sexism and anti-ageism, to name a few — Ms. Roddick believed that businesses could be run ethically, with what she called “moral leadership,” and still turn a profit. At times, her anti-establishment philosophy seemed to clash with her stature as a successful businesswoman. She joined the crowd of environmentalists, antiglobalists and anarchists in the front lines of the protest at the World Trade Organization negotiations in Seattle in 1999, for instance, and she was perhaps more beloved by those whose causes she supported than by her more conventional business peers. “Anita did more than run a successful ethical business: she was a pioneer of the whole concept of ethical and green consumerism,” Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, wrote in The Evening Standard on Tuesday. “There are quite a few business people today who claim green credentials, but none came anywhere near Anita in terms of commitment and credibility.” In a statement, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, called Ms. Roddick a “true pioneer.” “She campaigned for green issues for many years before it became fashionable to do so, and inspired millions to the cause by bringing sustainable products to a mass market,” Mr. Brown said. Anita Lucia Perilli was born in Littlehampton, England, in 1942, the daughter of Italian immigrants who ran a cafe and who put their four children to work there after school and on weekends, installing in their daughter a fierce work ethic that persisted through her life. Her parents divorced when she was a child, and her mother married her husband’s cousin Henry, who died of tuberculosis several years later. It was only when Anita turned 18 that her mother told her that Henry was, in fact, her father — that she had been the product of a passionate extramarital affair. Ms. Roddick said later that she had always felt closer to Henry than to the man she had thought was her father, and that the news made her feel “as if an enormous weight of guilt had been lifted from my shoulders.” After her application to drama school was turned down, Ms. Roddick worked for a time as a secondary school teacher and then quit to travel to Tahiti, Australia and South Africa, among other places, where she absorbed customs and ideas she would later apply to The Body Shop. “When you’ve lived for six months with a group that is rubbing their bodies with cocoa butter, and those bodies are magnificent, or if you wash your hair with mud, and it works, you go on to break all sorts of conventions, from personal ethics to body care,” she once said. She married Gordon Roddick, a Scottish poet, in 1970, when she was pregnant with their second daughter. When her husband later announced that he wanted to fulfill his dream of traveling on horseback from Buenos Aires to New York (and that, by the way, it might take a couple of years). Ms. Roddick took out a modest loan and in 1976 opened The Body Shop, her first, in Brighton. The shop sold just a handful of creams and hair-care products; its walls were painted green, to cover the damp spots. But it proved an unexpected success and the business began to grow, helped, too, by Mr. Roddick, when he came back from his trip. “He’s the doer, I’m the dreamer,” she once said. Within 15 years, The Body Shop stores had blanketed Britain and moved beyond, eventually numbering more than 2,000 in about 50 countries. Ms. Roddick rejected conventional marketing and was so recognizable, with her wild hair, wild public pronouncements and unbusinesslike demeanor and clothes, that she was probably her own best advertising. She used her stores to spread her philosophy and promote myriad causes and urged franchise owners and customers to join in. In 1990, she helped establish The Big Issue magazine, produced and sold by homeless people. She also set up Children on the Edge, a charity for children in Europe and Asia, and said she planned to give away most of her fortune. More recently, she had been campaigning to raise awareness of hepatitis C, which she contracted from a blood transfusion while giving birth to her younger daughter. But Ms. Roddick was, at the same time, a sharp businesswoman. The Body Shop was floated successfully on the stock exchange in the mid-1990s, and the company was sold to the French cosmetics giant L’Oréal for about $1.14 billion last year. Although the Roddicks had stepped down from managing the company in 2002, they remained on as nonexecutive directors and reportedly made about $237 million from their 18 percent stake. The decision drew criticism from environmentalists who said that, among other things, L’Oréal had yet to ban animal testing. But Ms. Roddick said she hoped The Body Shop would spur L’Oréal to behave more ethically in areas like community trade, which she called “the best poverty eradicator in the world.” In 2003, she was made a Dame of the British Empire. She is survived by her husband and their two daughters, Samantha and Justine. Among the great contradictions in a woman whose life was full of them was her tendency to scoff at the kinds of products her company sold. “How can you ennoble the spirit when you are selling something as inconsequential as face cream?” Ms. Roddick once said. She criticized cosmetics companies whose products promised youth and beauty, saying it was “totally ridiculous” to sell face creams that are “more expensive than gold.” “I have never felt that that beauty products are the body and blood of Jesus Christ,” she once said. “Nothing The Body Shop sells pretends to do anything other than it says. Moisturizers moisturize, fresheners freshen and cleansers cleanse. End of story.”

【經濟日報╱編譯于倩若／綜合倫敦十一日電】 2007.09.12 04:00 am 美體小舖創辦人羅迪克10日因腦溢血病逝，享年64歲。 美聯社 英國化妝品連鎖店美體小舖（Body Shop）創辦人安妮塔‧羅迪克（Anita Roddick）10日因腦溢血病逝，享年64歲。有「綠色女王」封號的羅迪克，生前是受人尊崇的女企業家，在維護人權和環境保護上貢獻良多。 身為英國知名的女企業家，羅迪克今年2月曾透露，1971年生女兒時，因為輸血感染C型肝炎。 1976年第一家美體小舖在英格蘭南部小鎮布萊頓開幕，當時羅迪克完全沒有創業和經營管理經驗，她說開店的動機純粹是想養家糊口。30多年來，美體小舖在全球50個國家擴增至2,000家分店。 從薄荷足部乳液到葡萄柚去角質霜，美體小舖推出未經動物測試的天然產品，並且採用環保袋，深受中產階級與崇尚有機食品的民眾所喜愛，也為羅迪克贏得「綠色女王」封號。 羅迪克說，她的環保概念傳承自歷經二次世界大戰艱困時期的母親。羅迪克說：「容器可以重新補充時，何必要拋棄？為何要買超過自己所需的份量？我承襲母親二戰時期的節約作法。物品再利用，儘量做回收。」 綠色和平組織執行長索文推崇羅迪克是了不起的女性，他說：「現在每家公司都說自己環保，但羅迪克幾十年前就開始身體力行。」 去年美體小舖被彩妝集團萊雅（L'Oreal）以6.52億英鎊（13億美元）收購，羅迪克與先生出售18%的股權獲利2.04億美元，引起美體小舖忠實顧客的不滿，他們擔心美體小舖的產品標準會有所妥協。 當時羅迪克為自己的決定辯護說：「美體小舖特立獨行、改變企業規則的形象，不會改變。這是我們基因的一部份。」 美體小舖被併購後，羅迪克仍然擔任這家公司的顧問。但今年稍早她接受媒體訪問時表示，很後悔1984年讓美體小舖在公開上市，因為這導致她失去部分控制權。 羅迪克鼓勵向第三世界的小社區採購材料以鼓勵這些國家的發展。為了提倡再生能源，她還在英國威爾斯投資風力發電廠。這位兼顧商業和社會責任的傑出女性2005年曾說過，要將5,100萬英鎊（逾1億美元）的財產全部捐給慈善機構，因為她不希望自己死時還抱著大筆財富。