Anita Roddick was born on 23 October 1942 in Littlehampton, a coastal town in West Sussex, England. She grew up in the United Kingdom and was educated at Worthing High School before going on to study at Bath Spa University. That grounding in southern England would remain part of her story throughout a career that eventually stretched well beyond its modest origins.

Roddick worked as an entrepreneur and became a founder — most notably the founder of The Body Shop, a cosmetics company that produced and retailed natural beauty products. The Body Shop set itself apart by prohibiting the use of products tested on animals in some of its lines and by being one of the first companies to promote fair trade with developing countries. Alongside her work building the business, Roddick was active as a human rights activist, a women's rights activist, and an environmental campaigner, causes she pursued in parallel with her commercial work rather than keeping them at arm's length from it.

Her contributions were recognised through a number of honours and awards. She received an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and was later elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She also received an honorary doctorate from the Open University and the Audubon Medal, an award given for distinguished service to the environment and conservation. Together these honours reflected the dual nature of her public life — the business she had built and the activist commitments she had sustained alongside it.

Roddick died on 10 September 2007 in Chichester, West Sussex, not far from the part of England where she had been born sixty-four years earlier. She was a British citizen who worked in English and left behind The Body Shop as a concrete marker of what she had built: a cosmetics business that had tied its commercial identity to natural products, animal welfare commitments, and fair trade principles at a time when few companies in the sector had done so.