The tyranny of the fashion designer history has struck again. With a flick of their marker pens, they have transformed quite sane women and men history Description into looking like the contents of a packet of Opal Fruits. In PR terms it is Description an excellent Architecture htm move - the combination of Patsy and Architecture Oxford has proved irresistible to htm journalists. history Description But there is htm a serious side; Ms Lumley has served on the Reference Committee of Friends Architecture Provident for six years, and the fellowship marks her stepping down.With Patsy and Description Ab Fab effectively Architecture laid to history rest - a last special is planned for the autumn - the Green College fellowship would be a fitting epitaph to an extraordinary career. When the oil tanker the Sea Empress foundered at Milford Haven in February, Ms Lumley sent a personal Architecture htm letter of protest Description to the Prime Minister.It actions such as these that have prompted the Friends Provident Financial Group to sponsor a research fellowship at Green history College, Oxford, in htm Joanna Lumley's name.

The company specialises in ethical investments, and the fellowship is for post-graduate research into environmental or wildlife issues, particularly in Africa. And since 1980 she has tried hard to honour a commitment she made to do at least one straight stage-play every year, including Hedda Gabler, The Cherry Orchard, and most recently Somerset Maugham's The Letter.Joanna Lumley's dedication to animal and environmental causes is renowned. In 1994 she emerged in tears from a film on the export of live animals for slaughter, and earlier this year she made headlines again when she took a piglet to Parliament as a member of a delegation from Compassion in World Farming. But was she interesting, what did she have to say? "Some women are beautiful, most are not. She was," is his final word on the matter.She is that and more, summed up by some seminal Lumley milestones. She came top of a panel of celebrities asked to sit the public schools Common Entrance exam by a newspaper, scoring just 2 per cent less than AJP Taylor in the history paper; then there was a sponsored strip before a bemused Terry Wogan on Children in Need in the Eighties; she was a columnist on the Times, and a member of the Booker Prize panel in 1984. She is popular with women, too, and perhaps it is women who have the greater debt to La Lumley.

Over the years her sharp intelligence, her independence - she was a frowned- upon single mother in the Sixties - her talent and glamour, and her outspoken commitment to good causes, and, above all, her triumph over the menopausal years, have shown that it is possible to be all things to all men without alienating them, scaring them off or becoming a joke.Undoubtedly, she has some advantages. "I met her at a Spectator lunch about nine years ago, when she was first entering intellectual life She was dazzlingly beautiful. One was just awe-struck: a-b-sol-ute-ly awe- struck," says one jaded connoisseur of both intellect and beauty. But the humour was there, lurking beneath the glam surface, as if at any moment she would crack up, with the laughter directed at herself more than any other individual.It is not only men who regard her with affection. From ambitious young photographic model in the Sixties to fledgling actress - she was Ken Barlow's upper-class girlfriend for a time in Coronation Street - via Bond girl status in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the Avengers, and the dreadful Sapphire and Steel, she played it straight. Patsy is up there in the sit- com hall of fame along with Basil Fawlty, Reginald Perrin, and Victor Meldrew.They are, of course, all men. Successful funny women are rare, and Lumley's persona of sex-bomb-with-a-sense-of-humour has been her ace.