MANILA – Corazon "Cory" Aquino, the brave housewife in the yellow dress, was a reluctant leader who overcame the murder of her husband to guide the Philippines through a bloodless popular revolt against tyranny.

The convent-bred woman who died last weekend aged 76 was transformed from the shy and withdrawn spouse of a gregarious politician-husband into a leader who oversaw the restoration of democracy after a generation of martial rule.

But as president in place of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Aquino faced down no less than seven coup attempts, and the Philippines remains mired in political instability and poverty.

For three days in February 1986, the world watched riveted as the devout Roman Catholic in a canary-yellow dress led millions in a peaceful uprising against Marcos, who had ruled with an iron fist for two decades.

During the next six years, Aquino had the country's constitution rewritten and freed scores of political dissidents, starting peace talks in a bid to end long-running communist and Muslim separatist insurgencies.

But she had little room for financial maneuver as she honored billions of dollars of debts run up by Marcos, and by the time she ended her term in 1992 the Philippines was in the grip of 12-hour daily power outages.

"I realized that I could have made things easier for myself if I had done the popular things, rather than the painful but better ones in the long run. After all, in the long run, I wouldn't be around to be blamed," she said later.

Aquino had an uneasy relationship with the military that propped up Marcos, but some of the same officers who led the unsuccessful coup attempts paid her high praise after her death.

"Her aura was her armor. You couldn't possibly hurt her," said retired navy commodore Rex Robles, who as a young colonel was among a group of officers who launched a series of armed attempts to topple Aquino in the late 1980s.

Some critics say Aquino's pro-democracy work was left unfinished because it failed to change a deep-rooted system in which a handful of elite clans, often big landowners like her own family, rule the country.

Time Magazine made Aquino its Woman of the Year in 1986, the year she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2006 named her one of Asia's heroes.

It praised her "quiet courage", describing her as "the symbol of people power and an inspiration to others around the world struggling against tyranny".

After her stint in the Malacanang presidential palace, Aquino devoted herself to volunteer work. She occasionally spoke out on politics, such as in 2005 when former protege Gloria Arroyo was impeached but eventually exonerated on charges of stealing the 2004 presidential election.

Last year the family announced Aquino was suffering from terminal colon cancer, and last month refused further medical treatment.

Born into the Cojuangco clan in the northern province of Tarlac on January 25, 1933, Aquino was a product of privilege, power and wealth.

Educated in the United States and Manila, she entertained no political ambitions -- but that changed when she met and married Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, a bright young politician from another Tarlac clan in 1954.

The groom was seen by many as a president in the making, and for Marcos that made the then-senator a threat.

In September 1972, Marcos declared martial law and jailed hundreds of his opponents and critics including Benigno Aquino, who was later freed from jail to seek medical treatment abroad.

In 1983, against the advice of friends, Benigno Aquino flew back to the Philippines from US exile to lead the non-communist opposition to the ailing Marcos.

The exile was gunned down by assassins as he stepped off the plane at Manila airport.

His grief-stricken widow flew back to the Philippines, where she was quickly thrust into the role of uniting the opposition and stood against Marcos in a snap presidential election.

Massive fraud allegations sparked church-backed opposition protests that unleashed a million people onto the streets, the "people power" legions who forced Marcos to flee to US exile and installed the widow to the presidency.*AFP

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