Body Shop Founder & Environmental Campaigner Anita Roddick 1942-2007

Anita Roddick, the founder of the cosmetics firm The Body Shop, would have turned 65 years old tomorrow. She died last month of a brain hemorrhange. Roddick was a well-known environmental campaigner and a pioneer of cruelty-free beauty products. Her husband Gordon Roddick is holding a memorial service tomorrow in London with the theme "I am an activist."

Anita Roddick founded The Body Shop in 1976. The company gained enormous success and grew to 2,000 stores spanning 50 countries. All the while Roddick remained a committed and outspoken activist.

She was involved in a range of movements, from opposing animal testing, corporate globalization, and war, to supporting indigenous rights and political prisoners. The daughter of Italian immigrants in Britain, she pioneered notions of social and environmental responsibility in the business world and was knighted Dame Anita Roddick by the Queen of England in 2003. Ralph Nader described her as "a glorious combination of character and personality who had her priorities high and wide enough to ask the most fundamental questions of big business and answer them by her deeds and her words."

In October of 2001 filmmaker Mark Achbar interviewed Anita Roddick in Seattle, Washington during production of his Parts of this interview were used in Achbar"s 2003 documentary film "The Corporation." I want to now play excerpts from the interview beginning with Anita Roddick speaking about The Body Shop.

• Anita Roddick, interviewed by Mark Achbar

One issue particularly close to Anita Roddick"s heart was the case of three political prisoners known as the Angola three. This is the case of three Black Panther Party activists held in solitary confinement for over three decades in Angola, Louisiana"s state prison built on the site of a former slave plantation. Gordon Roddick told reporters last week that he planned to continue his wife's work and hoped to help free two of the still imprisoned Angola 3, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Herman Wallace paid tribute to Anita Roddick in a conversation with independent filmmaker Angad Bhalla last Saturday.

• Herman Wallace

Herman Wallace has spent 35 years in solitary confinement in Angola. Over the past six years he has been exchanging letters with a young architect Jackie Sumell, who has designed his dream house based on his letters. The project is on display at the Artist's Space in New York and is dedicated to Anita Roddick. The actual house is expected to be built in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, where Wallace's sister's home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. This is how Herman Wallace explained the significance of this house and Anita Roddick's work.

• Herman Wallace

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