One got famous wearing mouse ears. One got famous wearing brightly colored shifts. And one got famous wearing down the opposition while carrying a handbag.

The trio of famous deaths this week seems incongruous. Yet these spirited women were all vivid emblems of their time.

Three very different worlds are conjured up when you think about Annette Funicello, Lilly Pulitzer and Margaret Thatcher.

As a tot, I spent every afternoon in my Mickey Mouse Club ears and underwear, glued to the television watching Annette and company. The comely daughter of an auto mechanic, she grew up in the San Fernando Valley and came across as the unpretentious Italian girl next door who might actually be your friend, or date.

Even later, donning twopiece bathing suits in her goofy beach party movies with Frankie Avalon, she seemed as innocent as Sally Field in her flying nun outfit.

Annette was the avatar for carefree childhood and carefree summer. Maybe that’s why it was such a shock when she revealed in 1992 she had MS. The merry Mouseketeer and mother of three handled that merciless illness with grace, becoming the face of MS. Years after using a walker to accept her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1993, Funicello lost the ability to walk or speak.

Pulitzer, another ambassador of fun, fashioned her dream life by branding a sweet slice of the American dream. She made citrus-bright resort wear that was, as Vanity Fair put it, “shorthand for WASP wealth at play.”

Just as Annette did not give in to her disease, Lilly, the daughter of a Standard Oil heiress, did not give in to the dictates of her stuffy oldmoney background. After she married a Pulitzer heir and moved to Palm Beach, she wandered the town barefoot, threw wild parties, had three kids and suffered a nervous breakdown.

While Lilly was known as “the ultimate party girl,” Maggie was “the ultimate conservative pinup.”

Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter and mother of modern conservatism, had her faults, heaven knows. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy called her a combination of Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand and Dr. Strangelove. Francois Mitterrand said she had the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.

The Iron Lady could be harsh, but she was that rarest of creatures: a female leader who stayed womanly yet transcended gender.

While at a Group of 7 meeting in Paris in 1989, Mitterrand had given her bad placement twice compared with other world leaders.

As Maggie left Paris, she slyly presented Mitterrand a book bound in red leather: “A Tale of Two Cities.”

MAUREEN DOWD writes for the New York Times News Service.