Vidal Sassoon (17January 1928 9May 2012) was a British hairstylist and businessman. He was noted for repopularising a simple, close-cut geometric hairstyle called the five-pointcut, worn by fashion designers including Mary Quant and film stars such as Mia Farrow, Goldie Hawn, Cameron Diaz, and Helen Mirren.
His early life was one of extreme poverty, with sevenyears of his childhood spent in an orphanage. He quit school at age14, soon holding various jobs in London during World WarII. Although he hoped to become a professional football player, he became an apprentice hairdresser at the suggestion of his mother.
After developing a reputation for his innovative cuts, he moved to LosAngeles in the early1970s, where he opened the first worldwide chain of hairstyling salons, complemented by a line of hair-treatmentproducts.
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, in1900. Although she was surrounded by grinding poverty, Sassoon writes that she nonetheless resolved to make the best of her life. They met in 1925 and married in 1927. They then moved to Shepherd's Bush, which contained a community of Greek Jews.
His father abandoned the family for another woman when Vidal was three yearsold. until he was 11, when his mother remarried.
When she took him to the hairdressing school of a well-known stylist, Adolph Cohen, they were disappointed immediately when they were told it was a two-yearprogramme and would cost much more than they could afford. "My mother looked so terribly dejected", he said, that as they left the salon, "I thought she might faint". to prevent SirOswald Mosley's movement from spreading "messages of hatred" in the period following World WarII.
In1948, at the age of20, he joined the (which shortly afterwards was integrated into the Israel Defense Forces) and fought in the 1948Arab–Israeli War, which began after Israel declared statehood. Sassoon arrived in Mandatory Palestine in April1948, a month before Israeli independence. He fought in the Negev against the EgyptianArmy. During an interview, he described the year he spent training with the Israelis as "the best year of my life", and recalled how he felt: