Entrepreneur, prophet of “new age” business management and tireless campaigner for moral causes close to her heart, Anita Roddick was for many years the most famous businesswoman in Britain. At its height, her Body Shop empire had more than 2,100 branches in 55 countries, and the chain’s success made Roddick one of the richest women in the land.

Her genius lay in, first, pioneering the sale of naturally based skin and hair care preparations, be it Fuzzy Peach Bath and Shower Gel or Brazil Nut Conditioner, at just the right time; secondly, developing a whole new market that capitalised on the growing worries about animal testing and the use of chemicals in cosmetics; and thirdly, transforming the way such products were sold around the world.

With her Latin looks, famous bird’s nest hair, legendary energy, outspoken views and unorthodox dress sense — which manifested itself in a fondness for laddered tights and Doc Marten boots — she was a marketing man’s dream come true. Her flair for publicity won free editorial space for The Body Shop worth millions of pounds.

But, although she became the chain’s public face, she was quick to acknowledge that her self-effacing husband, Gordon — who devised the franchise system that spawned the global network of outlets and also oversaw the finances — was as crucial to the company’s success as she was. “He’s the do-er. I’m the dreamer,” she said. But, though she appeared to prefer to concentrate on the broad picture rather than get bogged down in detail, a shrewd business brain lay behind her hippy chick, earth mother image.

Long before such things became dogma, Roddick embraced a green, and left-leaning, agenda. She called for greater environmental protection and Third World aid, and customers at her shops would be confronted, in addition to her beauty products, with pamphlets on issues that she believed The Body Shop should support. This earned her the nickname “the Queen of Green”.

This extended to her involvement with such organisations as Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, Shelter and CND, and her initiatives in support of education and the homeless. She was instrumental in helping to set up the Big Issue magazine, whose founder, John Bird, always described her as the mother of the publication.

She was born Anita Lucia Perilli in Littlehampton, West Sussex, in 1942, the daughter of Jewish-Italian immigrants who ran a café. She described the upbringing she shared with her two sisters and brother as “sublime”.

When she was 9 her mother divorced her husband and married his cousin Henry, whom Anita had always adored. He died from tuberculosis within a couple of years. Only when she turned 18 did her mother tell her that Henry was, in fact, her real father — that she had been the product of a passionate affair.

She was educated at St Joseph’s Convent, Littlehampton, and then nearby Maude Allen Secondary Modern, after failing her 11-plus exam. From an early age she loved drama and set her sights on acting. But she was turned down by the Central School of Speech and Drama, and settled instead for a teacher-training course at the Newton Park College of Higher Education in Bath.

Roddick returned to Maude Allen to teach English and history. But the freewheeling ethos of the Sixties exerted its pull on her, and she decided to quit her job to travel the world. During the next 18 months, she worked in Paris and Geneva, and spent some time among the islands of Polynesia.

On her return, she met Gordon Roddick — the son of a successful Scottish grain broker — at a nightclub run by her mother in Littlehampton. It was love at first sight. “I had a body that wanted children, so I seduced him,” she explained.

The couple married in Reno in 1970 after the birth of their first daughter, Justine. They then hit the hippy trail before returning to Littlehampton, first to run a bed-and-breakfast business, then a restaurant called Paddington’s, which proved to be “a great dress rehearsal”, as she liked to say, for running her future business.

After the birth of their second daughter, Samantha, Gordon Roddick suddenly announced that he wanted to fulfil a childhood ambition by riding a horse from Buenos Aires to New York, which he thought would take about two years.

Many a marriage would have foundered on the strains implicit in such an undertaking, but Anita gave her husband her blessing. Crucially, before he left he helped her to negotiate a £4,000 bank loan, and it was this that she used to open the first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976.

It began by selling 25 naturally based skin and hair care preparations and was so successful that she soon opened a second shop, financed by selling half the company to a local garage owner. By the time Gordon returned, Roddick had the world in her sights. Her husband created the business structures to help her to achieve her goal.

The company thrived on its forward-looking, informal style. In an anticipation of a trend since widely copied, staff called their boss by her Christian name. Her mission statements adorned the walls of the company’s factory in Littlehampton, and she spoke of the need to find “a new way of measuring business success”. By the mid-1980s The Body Shop had become a leading retailer and Roddick a media star. She was named Business Woman of the Year, honoured by universities on both sides of the Atlantic and appointed OBE in 1988. In 1991 she published her autobiography, Body and Soul.

The company’s flotation in 1985 had been a success. By 1990 Roddick’s 30 per cent stake in The Body Shop made her the fourth-richest woman in the UK.

By the late 1990s, however, the company’s public image was suffering for the first time. There were trading problems in the US and attacks on The Body Shop’s ethics that hurt its share price and led to her branding financiers “pin-striped dinosaurs”. While Roddick’s supreme confidence helped The Body Shop to ride out the storm, the sale of the company in March 2006 to the French cosmetics giant L’Oréal for £652 million seemed to come as somewhat a relief to her.

Rebuffing accusations that she had let anyone down by selling to a company that had a record of animal testing and was at the vanguard of an industry that she had famously described as “a monster selling unattainable dreams, one that lies, cheats and exploits women”, she claimed that The Body Shop could act as a kind of “Trojan horse”.

“People lost sight of what we were good at. We were brilliant at campaigning. We changed the economic structure of purchasing. If L’Oréal is going to adopt that, fantastic.”

Moving on from The Body Shop was to free her up for her philanthropic interests. She and Gordon made almost £130 million from the sale, of which £30 million went directly into her foundation. Believing that it was a disgrace to die rich, she devoted her time, money and energy to her charitable commitments.

One cause that received particular attention from Roddick in her later years was that of the efficient diagnosis and treatment of hepatitis C, from which she suffered. She had discovered that she had the virus only in 2004, after a routine medical examination, and only began feeling its effects three years later, when she went public with the news. She had contracted it about 35 years earlier, when she was given a transfusion with infected blood at the birth of her second daughter. She became patron of the Hepatitis C Trust and began raising awareness of this disease known as “the silent killer”.

Rodick was appointed DBE in 2003.

She is survived by her husband, Gordon, and by their two daughters.

Dame Anita Roddick, DBE, founder of The Body Shop, was born on October 23, 1942. She died after a stroke on September 10, 2007, aged 64