Anita Roddick's Legacy: Changing the Face of an Industry

 

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But, as she grew older, her priorities shifted. Refusing to "die rich," as she put it, she gave away money to the tune of $6 million per year, investing in various charities.

In February, she announced that she had unknowingly contracted the virus Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion while giving birth to her youngest daughter, Sam, years ago.

Her reaction to the news? "It's a bit of a bummer, but you groan and move on."

"After the hepatitis diagnosis," Bentley said, "we expected her to slow down, but she just kept" going, until her premature death from a brain hemorrhage Monday night.

Friends like Juniper remember an "enormously energetic" woman who "showed you that you should never assume that something can't be done, because it can!"

"What she did," according to Fanshawe, "was to make the idea of very big change seem possible. In that sense, she inspired many people to feel that they too could change the world."

"There is no more powerful institution in society than business," Roddick wrote in her book "Business as Unusual."

And there were few people who transformed the nature of business with as much passion and thoroughness as this one-time schoolteacher from Littlehampton, England.