About Vidal Sassoon
Vidal Sassoon (17 January 1928 – 9 May 2012) was a British hairstylist and businessman. He was a pioneer of modern haircuts, structuring hair by cutting rather than styling. In particular he popularised a simple, close-cut geometric hairstyle called the five-point cut, worn by fashion designers including Mary Quant and film stars such as Mia Farrow, Goldie Hawn, Cameron Diaz, Nastassja Kinski and Helen Mirren. His early life was one of extreme poverty, with seven years of his childhood spent in an orphanage. He quit school at age 14, soon holding various jobs in London during World War II. Although he hoped to become a professional footballer, he became an apprentice hairdresser at the suggestion of his mother. After developing a reputation for his innovative cuts, he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, where he opened the first worldwide chain of hairstyling salons, complemented by a line of hair-treatment products. He sold his business interests in the early 1980s and began funding Israeli think tanks. In 2009, Sassoon was appointed CBE by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. Vidal Sassoon: The Movie, a documentary film about his life, was released in 2010. In 2012, he was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork, the album cover for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, to celebrate the British cultural figures of the prior six decades. == Early life == Sassoon was born to Jewish parents in Hammersmith, West London, and lived nearby in Shepherd's Bush. His mother, Betty (Bellin) (1900–1997), an Ashkenazi Jew, was born in Aldgate, in the East End of London, in 1900. Although she was surrounded by grinding poverty, Sassoon writes that she nonetheless resolved to make the best of her life. Her family had emigrated to England from the Russian Empire in the 1880s to escape the antisemitism and pogroms then prevalent. His father, Jack Sassoon, a Sephardi Jew, was born in Thessaloniki, in the northern part of Greece. They met in 1925 and married in 1927.
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