As Anita Roddick bows to the clamour from shareholders for change at the Body Shop,

Kirsty Scott looks at a life less ordinary than most in the City.

MOST chief executives watching control of their company slipping from their grasp might be tempted to spend the final hours locked in boardroom meetings or poring over reports and accounts. Not so Anita Roddick.

Earlier this week, as investors upped the pressure for her to relinquish the reins of her phenomenally successful Body Shop chain, she was to be found shut in a cage outside the Burmese Embassy in London, protesting at human rights abuses and urging passers-by to put their thumbprints on yet another morally sound petition.

It was a fitting gesture for Roddick, who has delighted in flouting sober - she would say dull - business convention and rattling the ''pinstriped dinosaurs'' of the City's investment community whom she has reviled so publicly.

But for all her bravado, the dinosaurs have won out and, yesterday, it was announced she had stepped down from her position as chief executive of the company she built from scratch more than 20 years ago and once described as ''my child, my embryo''.

She will be replaced by Mr Patrick Gournay, an executive of the French foods company Groupe Danone, and will become a co-chairman with her husband, Gordon.

Body Shop officials admitted yesterday that investors had pushed for change at the group after a steep fall in shares. The company has been floundering on all fronts for some time and there were fears it would go the same way as the beleaguered Laura Ashley.

Losses in America have deepened; the outlets in Asia have been hit by the economic instability in the region; and in the UK the Body Shop has been a victim of its own success, losing out in competition with other natural cosmetic brands which followed in its footsteps. New concepts such as aromatherapy treatments and massages, and plans to revamp the distinctive style of the shops failed to stop the decline.

Mr Roddick said yesterday his wife had wanted to step down and would continue to be the face of the Body Shop worldwide. The firm, he said, had simply got too big for both of them. Today, there are more than 1500 of the distinctive green shops selling the eco-friendly lotions and potions in 47 countries.

It's a far cry from the small store sandwiched between two funeral parlours in Brighton, where Anita Roddick launched her idea for a cruelty-free, socially conscious range of cosmetics and toiletries in the summer of 1976.

She had been turned down by a number of large cosmetic makers and recruited a herbalist she found in the Yellow Pages to get her started. The cheapest form of packaging she could find for her products was a supply of urine sample bottles, which she offered to refill with products of their choice if customers brought them back to the shop.

Within a year, she had opened a second shop in Chichester and by 1984 the firm went public in London. Four years later, the first US store opened and, in 1990, they moved into Asia.

The daughter of Italian immigrants, Roddick quickly became as identifiable as her trademark products with her unruly hair, hippie clothes, and her passion for numerous causes. She was lauded as the woman who changed the face of British business but steadfastly refused to play the part of the multi-millionaire entrepreneur that the 1980s had carved out for her.

A year after they launched on the Stock Exchange, she started the first of many tie-ins with environmental or humanitarian causes: this time, sponsoring posters for a Greenpeace protest of hazardous waste dumping in the North Sea.

Many more were to follow and, while they attracted great plaudits in the early days, some people grew tired of the relentless political correctness and the endless pressure to buy into issues when all you wanted was a bar of soap.

Roddick and her husband were often pilloried in the press as tree-huggers and she eventually won the nickname the Queen of Green.

People laughed at the company motto: head in the clouds, feet on the ground, heart in the business; they sniggered over the firm's Values Report which detailed the pollution caused by Body Shop executives travelling by plane on company business; and they laughed at the funding of an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice at the University of Bath.

The high profile of the firm brought more serious scrutiny of its policies and practices and resulted in a successful libel case against Channel Four in 1993, after the station claimed that Body Shop cosmetics contained animal products. A separate American magazine article also questioned the sincerity of the Body Shop's environmental approach.

Roddick took further flak for doing an advert for American Express which showed her hugging a group of native women in a manner which many people found patronising. More recently, there have been rumblings of frustration amongst franchisees and, a few weeks ago, she was accused of being irresponsible for launching a range of skin-care products containing hemp.

Those who have worked with her describe her as a fireball who rarely sits still. She is said to feel uncomfortable with her enormous wealth.

She and her husband own 25% of the business and she is listed as the 14th richest woman in the UK, worth around #80m.

She is a mother of two and a grandmother. She has told friends she feels she walks around with a target on her back; that she thinks of herself as an outsider; that, at 55, she has 20 or 30 years of campaigning still to do.

For most of her time at the helm of the company, she had managed to keep the City at arm's length. Three years ago, she considered taking the group private but dropped the idea as impractical.

Investors were said to be pressuring her to spend more time searching for new products overseas. Body Shop officials, meanwhile, insist her creative and networking talents will continue to be invaluable.

After her sit-in outside the Burmese Embassy and as the dry details of her move were being ironed out in offices in the Square Mile yesterday, Anita Roddick was thousands of miles away, off with the Dalai Lama on another campaign, another crusade to be won.

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