Founder of the Body Shop and ethics campaigner Anita Roddick, who died a year ago today, was arguably the most famous businesswoman in Britain.

Founded in what Dame Anita described as “a series of brilliant accidents”, the first Body Shop opened in Brighton in 1976, positioned between two funeral parlours. The owner of one complained to the council about the name, while a local bookmaker took bets on how long it would be before the shop closed.

Thirty years later the chain had over 2,000 stores in more than 50 countries.

Dame Anita was born in Littlehampton, West Sussex, in 1942, to Jewish-Italian immigrants. She had a brother and two sisters. Her mother divorced her husband when Dame Anita was nine, marrying his cousin Henry shortly afterwards. It was only when Dame Anita turned 18 that she learned Henry was her real father after all, though he had died of tuberculosis some years earlier.

She met Scottish-born Gordon Roddick in a Littlehampton nightclub owned by her mother in the ‘60s and married him in 1970. The couple spent many years travelling, gaining the knowledge of different cultures that would later help them market the Body Shop globally.

The couple had two daughters, Justine and Samantha, and cut their business teeth with first a B&B and then a restaurant. It would later be Gordon’s sound business structures that complemented Anita’s idealistic philosophies to drive the Body Shop forward.

The original Body Shop was opened to create an income for herself and her daughters while Gordon was on a horse-riding riding trek across the Americas. Its success was based around providing a range of beauty products that used natural ingredients, capitalising on growing public concern about animal testing and chemicals in the cosmetic industry.

Dame Anita gained celebrity not only for the company’s success but also for its contentious marketing campaigns and her outspoken views on politics, animal and human rights and the beauty industry establishment.

The Body Shop courted controversy not only because of its high ethical standards but also for its pro-active stance, forming alliances with groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

Dame Anita explained: "For me, campaigning and good business is also about putting forward solutions, not just opposing destructive practices or human rights abuses".

Dame Anita was also renowned for her eccentric dress sense and gregarious personality. Her turn of phrase and a knack for self-publicity helped gain her company many inches of free column space in the press.

This unconventional, outgoing approach to business was in part thanks to unfulfilled acting ambitions. After failing to gain entry to stage school as a youngster, she turned her attention to a teacher-training course at Bath College instead. “If I couldn’t perform on stage, I decided I’d perform in the classroom,” she once said.

Dame Anita won many awards for her business and campaigning work, was awarded the OBE in 1988 and became a dame in 2003. Ironically, the success of the Body Shop, which made her one of the richest people in the world, also constantly threatened to compromise her ideals.

In 1984 the company, now boasting nationwide stores, was floated on the stock exchange and within two years its share value had risen by over 900 per cent. In 2006, the company was sold to the cosmetic giant L’Oreal in a takeover worth £652m (including a personal fortune of £130m for the Roddicks) causing an outcry among critics of L’Oreal’s testing practices. However, some commentators already felt that the Body Shop brand had become focused on profits and shareholders long before the sales.

Nevertheless, Dame Anita kept up her campaigning throughout her life, founding both the Body Shop Foundation to help innovative global projects and Children On The Edge, a charity to aid young people affected by disease and disasters. She also gave away much of her fortune to worthy causes and lived frugally on a farmhouse in Sussex.

She was posting messages in support of Amnesty International and other human rights groups on her website right up until her death from an unexpected brain haemorrhage. She was survived by her husband and their two daughters.