Nothing Like a Dame

At 62, many entrepreneurs feel it's time to get out of the rat race and put their feet up beside the pool. Not Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, one of Britain's most successful global retailers.

"A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force," she declares. "I love it."

She has been fairly unstoppable all her life. The daughter of Italian immigrants in seaside Littlehampton, Roddick says that when she was 10, she was attracted — in the week her father died — to a book about the Holocaust:...