Vidal Sassoon

Vidal Sassoon was born in 1928 in Hammersmith, London, to a poor Greek-Jewish family. When he was three his father abandoned the household, and his mother, unable to feed both her sons, placed Vidal and his brother in an orphanage for several years before scraping together enough to bring them home. As a teenager he was apprenticed to a hairdresser largely because his mother had a premonition that it would be his future, not because he wanted it.

He fought as a young man with a Jewish militant group against fascists in London's East End and briefly served in the new state of Israel, before returning to hairdressing with more discipline than before. In 1954 he opened his first salon on Bond Street and began stripping away the stiff, heavily lacquered styles of the era, cutting hair instead into precise geometric shapes that moved with the head and needed little styling.

His 1963 five-point bob, created for the fashion designer Mary Quant, became a symbol of a changing decade, and Sassoon expanded from cutting hair into training academies and, from the 1970s, his own shampoo brand, sold eventually to Procter and Gamble in a deal worth many millions.

He remained proud, to the end of his life, of having built something respectable from a childhood of poverty and dependence, and he gave money throughout his life to causes fighting antisemitism and prejudice, the forces that had shaped his own hard start.