Joanna Lumley is best-known as Bollinger-quaffing, chain-smoking fashionista Patsy Stone in the hit BBC comedy, Absolutely Fabulous.
Off set however, Lumley could not be further from her decadent alter ego. She has been using her eloquence and keen sense of injustice to make impassioned campaigns for animal welfare and for human rights.
Harnessing her famed good looks and high profile, she helped to win an acclaimed victory for the Gurkha Justice Campaign, for retired Gurkha soldiers who served in the British Army to have rights to settle in Britain.
Launching the campaign, Lumley said: "Our debt of honour to the Gurkhas remains. They helped fight our wars and keep our peace. They stood up for us and now is the time to stand up for them".
Her trip to Downing Street for the Gurkhas was not her first time using the limelight to promote one of the myriad causes close to her heart. As an avowed vegetarian and animal rights campaigner, she first arrived to protest at No 10 in 1980 seeking to prevent seal culling.
The breadth of her interests means that she has a dizzying range of causes: there's also Free Tibet, Compassion in World Farming, tribal rights charity Survival International, mental health organisation Mind, Legal Aid funding, tiger preservation, Low Incomes Tax Reform - the list goes on and on. She has even taken an interest in politics, funding Caroline Lucas's election campaign for the Green Party.
For all her tireless activism, The Daily Telegraph dubbed her "a thespian rebel with a cause".