Gordon Roddick

Anita Lucia Perella was born in a bomb shelter in Littlehampton, Sussex. She was one of four children of Gilda (née de Vito), wife of restaurateur Donato Perella. Her biological father was Donato's cousin, Henry Perilli, an ice-cream and soda bar proprietor. Her surname at birth was registered as Perella.

She was educated in Littlehampton, at St Joseph's Convent and Maude Allen secondary modern school. She then trained as a schoolteacher at Newton Park College of Education in Bath, Somerset, following which she taught history and English at Maude Allen school.

Roddick was known for her campaigning work on environmental issues and was a member of the advisory council for the think tank, Demos. However, despite her high profile statements regarding The Body Shop's charitable mission, it did not make charitable donations for its first 11 years of operation. After the company entered the stock exchange in 1984, the first sponsorship, made possible by the money generated by the IPO, was for Greenpeace posters in 1985.

In 1990 Roddick founded Children on the Edge (COTE), in response to her visits to Romanian orphanages. She created COTE to help manage the crisis of poor conditions in the overcrowded orphanages and worked to de-institutionalise the children over the course of their early life. COTE's mission is to help disadvantaged children affected by conflicts, natural disasters, disabilities, and HIV/AIDS.

In the late 1990s, Roddick became involved in the case of the Angola Three, African-American men who had been held for more than two decades in solitary confinement at Louisiana State Penitentiary. She helped raise international awareness of their case and funds to support appeals of their flawed convictions.

On 13 December 2005, the National Post reported that Roddick had announced that she intended to use her fortune for philanthropy; it was estimated at £51 million ($104 million). This was before the sale of her business to L'Oreal.

Roddick wrote a book, Take It Personally. She encouraged equality and an end to the exploitation of workers and children in underdeveloped countries.

Between 2009 and 2014, the Roddick Foundation gave four grants totalling £120,000 to CAGE, an organisation led by Mozzam Begg, that aimed "to raise awareness of the plight of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror". The Foundation, along with two other charities, agreed to cease funding CAGE under pressure from Britain's Charity Commission, which had expressed concern that funding CAGE risked damaging public confidence in charity. Lord Carlile, formerly the British Government's independent reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, said: "I would never advise anybody to give money to CagePrisoners. I have concerns about the group".

In 2015, the Charity Commission agreed to cease to interfere with charities' right to fund CAGE, if they wished, following a judicial review which heard testimony that a British cabinet minister and US intelligence had applied pressure on the body to investigate CAGE.