Anita Roddick, who died yesterday at 64 after suffering a brain hemorrhage, was a globe-trotting hippie who in 1976 founded the Body Shop as a small cosmetics store in southern England, and then built it into an international powerhouse with $1 billion in annual sales in 50 countries.

She managed to do so while making her firm a leader in dozens of causes: workers’ rights, prison reform, environmentalism, and opposition to animal testing.

The chain specializes in natural products, including ingredients such as tea-tree oil, African salt, and Brazil nuts harvested by Kayapo Indians. In the early days, Roddick urged customers to bring their used containers back for refills to cut down on packaging waste.

She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003 for “services to retailing, the environment, and charity,” and sold the business in 2006 to the world’s largest cosmetics maker, L’Oreal SA, in a deal valued at $1.2 billion. The size of the deal was a fraught subject for her; in 2004, she told Time magazine, “I have a deep sense that to accumulate wealth is obscene.”

Frizzy-haired and standing just 5 feet 2 inches, she seemed an unlikely candidate for chief executive of an international company, but the Body Shop set a new corporate mold, so much so that it became a Harvard Business School case study.

Roddick was born Anita Lucia Perella, the daughter of Italian immigrants, in Littlehampton, Sussex, England. The family ran a small cafe that introduced the locals to exotic cuisine. “They never smelled garlic before we came,” Roddick once said.

Though trained as a schoolteacher, Roddick left Britain to work on a kibbutz in Israel, then worked and traveled around the world, including a sojourn as a librarian at the International Herald Tribune in Paris, the International Labor Organization in Geneva, and stops in the New Hebrides and Madagascar. In later interviews, she said she often noted that indigenous women had great skin, and she would ask them what cosmetics they used.

She was deported from South Africa in the late 1960s for violating apartheid laws when she visited a black nightclub. Back in Britain, her mother introduced her to Gordon Roddick, a Scot who also had a penchant for working holidays in exotic locales. After fathering two children with her, he went off to fulfill his dream: riding a horse to New York City from Buenos Aires.

Anita Roddick, meanwhile, opened the first Body Shop in Brighton, England, in 1976, and then a second in nearby Chichester. The shops followed a hippie aesthetic and were festooned with potpourri and scented with perfumes. Goods were packaged in generic bottles from a medical supply company, and customers could pick among oils to scent their cleaning and protective preparations. Roddick had immediate success and soon got into franchising. Gordon Roddick returned from his walkabout and settled in as the business brains behind her marketing juggernaut. When the chain went public in 1984, its shares went to $2.30 from $1.30 on the first day of trading. With two globetrotting hippies at the helm, the Body Shop sourced its supplies from indigenous people around the globe. There were cactus fiber backscrubbers and thick love potions made by Bedouin women. By 1996, there were 1,200 shops, many of them decorated with posters for Greenpeace and displaying fundraising pamphlets for other causes, in more than 40 countries. Anita Roddick became an outspoken advocate for human rights, for dealing directly with indigenous peoples, and for refusing to test on animals. She gave money to orphanages in Eastern Europe, launched a homeless newspaper project in London, and teamed with the founders of Ben & Jerry’s to form Businesses for Social Responsibility. When Roddick sold the business last year, she stood to make about $200 million but announced that she was planning to give the money away.

Some protested at the time that L’Oreal was known for testing its products on animals; some even called for a boycott of the Body Shop. But Roddick insisted in an interview with the Daily Telegraph of London: “The most exciting thing about this is that L’Oreal is asking us to teach it about community trade, which is the best poverty eradicator in the world.” Earlier this year, she announced that she had contracted hepatitis C, possibly dating back to a blood transfusion she received in 1971, at the birth of her daughter. “It’s a bit of a bummer but you groan and move on,” she said at the time. It was unclear whether her death was related to the disease.

Anita Roddick

Born October 23, 1942, in Littlehampton, Sussex, England; died September 10 of a brain hemorrhage in Chichester, West Sussex; survived by her husband, Gordon Roddick, and her daughters, Sam and Justine.