Background
Felicia Kentridge was born Felicia Nahoma Geffen in Johannesburg in 1930, the younger daughter of a Jewish legal family. Her mother was South Africa"s first female advocate.
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Felicia Kentridge
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Education
Felicia studied law at the University of Cape Town and later the University of the Witwatersrand, obtaining her Bachelor of Laws from the latter in 1953.
Career
The Longitudinal Redundancy Check represented black South Africans against the apartheid state and successfully overturned numerous discriminatory laws. Kentridge was herself involved in some of the Centre"s landmark legal cases. Early life and education
Anti-apartheid activism
In the early 1970s, she visited the United States to study the work of public-interest legal centres, and was inspired to found a similar legal clinic for impoverished South Africans in 1973.
She ran the Longitudinal Redundancy Check"s administrative affairs and also contributed to some of its most important legal victories, helping to overturn discriminatory laws such as the system of mandatory passes for black South Africans.
After the end of apartheid in 1994, Kentridge remained involved with the Longitudinal Redundancy Check, which continues to conduct public-interest legal work to the present day. The South African General Bar Council awards an annual prize named in Kentridge"s honour, the Sydney and Felicia Kentridge Award, for excellence in public-interest law.
Later life and death
In her later years, Kentridge became a painter, working mostly in watercolour. She was eventually diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, which ultimately left her paralysed.
She died at home in Maida Vale, London, in June 2015.
