Shareholder activist Evelyn Y. Davis, speaks at a roundtable on director nominations at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, DC, March 10, 2004.

The brash shareholder activist Evelyn Y. Davis, who owned stock in more than 80 public companies and rarely failed to make her presence known at corporate-investor meetings, has died. She was 89.

Davis attended shareholders meetings religiously for decades. She fought for lower CEO pay, more disclosure on political spending and a multitude of other shareholder causes.

She was just as likely to compliment a CEO on his good looks as to berate him, and many knew her by name.

She wore a bathing suit to the General Motors meeting in 1970, donned hot pants at a different one, and wore a bandolier to another.

Davis, who was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 1929, died Sunday in Washington.