Vidal Sassoon

“I wanted to eliminate the superfluous and get to the basic angles of cut and shape,” he reminisced in Craig Teper’s 2010 film, Vidal Sassoon, The Movie. Indeed, the word “hairdressing”, associated with formally-arranged “helmet” hairdos of the post-war years, held in place with stiff perms and lacquers, was anathema to Sassoon, who wanted his smooth, flat hairstyles to emphasise the face.

Beginning in the 1950s, he cut hair at razor-sharp angles to allow his clients’ cheekbones to become more prominent – to flattering effect. In 1963, he created his avant-garde five-point-cut, which, at the back, followed the hairline. Originally modelled by Grace Coddington, it was the culmination of almost a decade of restless experimentation.

Coaxed by his charm and confidence, Sassoon’s clients relinquished their backcombed coiffures for a more “progressive” look, created, he said, by his instinct for what he felt was right. Free of hair lacquer, cut simply using scissors, his low-maintenance, sleek, glossy styles swung effortlessly back into place, giving rise to the term “wash and wear”. The Sassoon cut came to epitomise the futuristic aesthetic of the Swinging Sixties as much as the miniskirts of Mary Quant (whose own characteristic bob sprung from Sassoon’s scissors) and the geometric simplicity of André Courrèges’s fashions.

In fact Sassoon, who was born in London to Sephardic Jewish parents, was chiefly inspired by the starkly modernist aesthetic of the Bauhaus, specifically that of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture. He often said that had he not come from a grindingly poor background, he would have been an architect.

His love of modernism was reflected in his open-plan, unisex Bond Street salon, which he opened in the mid-1950s. Gargantuan windows, allowing passers-by to see what was happening, helped demystify what went on inside. “It” girls and actresses clamoured for Sassoon’s radically innovative haircuts. When he lopped off Nancy Kwan’s four-foot mane, the terrified actress, unable to watch, played chess with her manager. Yet the resulting reinterpretation of a Twenties bob – named after her – was photographed by Terence Donovan and featured in Vogue.

Sassoon was also responsible for Mia Farrow’s ultra-gamine crop in the 1968 movie Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski (another client, as was Peter O’Toole). Her mention of it in the film – “It’s a Vidal Sassoon, it’s terribly in” – brought him to the attention of America.

Sassoon moved across the Atlantic in the late Sixties with his second wife Beverly, first to New York, then to Los Angeles. Together they wrote the bestselling book, A Year of Beauty and Health. He also built up a multi-million dollar hair and skin products corporation whose slogan was: “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” In 1982, he sold all the rights to his name and image to Richardson-Vicks, which was bought by Procter & Gamble in 1985. Sassoon ended up suing the latter, alleging it had destroyed his brand by skimping on marketing in favour of the company’s other hair products. However, there was a silver lining to this episode: he met his fourth wife, Rhonda, at P&G’s headquarters, where she was a design consultant. They were happily married for 20 years.

A Peter Pan-like figure, Sassoon kept forever youthful by practising Pilates and yoga. But besides an interest in aesthetics and physical wellbeing, he also had a deep-rooted sense of justice. He fought against anti-Semitic yobs rampaging around east London after the Second World War and set up a research centre for gathering information about anti-Semitism. He was also generous to charities, such as the Katrina Fund, which gives money to victims of the hurricane that devastated New Orleans.

Vidal Sassoon was born in Hammersmith on January 17 1928. His father Jack was a carpet-trader, his mother Betty, who came from a family of immigrants from Spain, worked in a sweatshop in Whitechapel. Sassoon had a younger brother, Ivor, who died aged 46. Jack, a womaniser, deserted the family when Vidal (who said his father spoke seven languages and made love in all of them) was three.

Lacking money to pay the rent, his mother was evicted, and the family was taken in by her sister in her overcrowded home in a tenement block on Petticoat Lane. Sassoon’s mother then placed him in a Jewish orphanage for seven years. Although conditions there were harsh, he was delighted that, for the first time, he could enjoy a hot bath. His mother was allowed to visit once a month.

During the Second World War, Sassoon briefly worked delivering messages by bike from the City to the docks. When he was 14, his mother, who somehow seems to have had a premonition that he would be a hairdresser, whisked him off to the Whitechapel hair salon of Adolph Cohen, where he worked as a shampoo boy.

After the war, outraged that Oswald Mosley’s followers were yelling “Yids out!” in London in the wake of the Holocaust, he joined the 43 group, a Jewish association established to campaign against anti-Semitism. In 1948, aged 20, Sassoon volunteered to fight in the Arab-Israeli war as part of the fledgling Israeli army. Fighting near Gaza, his unit suffered heavy casualties.

Back home, he applied to train under the flamboyant hairdresser “Teasy-Weasy” Raymond, but had to take elocution lessons (with the voice coach Iris Warren) to lose his East End accent before being taken on. It was while working for Raymond that he rebelled against the backcombing orthodoxy of the day. Soon he opened his own salon.

Sassoon was as demanding a boss as Raymond, often re-cutting his colleagues’ haircuts, though his demeanour was modern, dynamic and informal: he would dance nimbly round his clients while trimming their locks. On the first occasion he snipped Mary Quant’s, in 1957, he cut her ear, causing blood to gush everywhere. Fortunately she just giggled.

In 1965 he opened his first salon in New York. The press went wild, feting him as the crimping equivalent of the Beatles. His star rose even further in the early 1980s when he presented a television show called Your New Day, in which he interviewed stars on subjects other than those for which they were famous: Twiggy, for example, talked about her love of sewing.

But the ever-youthful Sassoon, who swore by health drinks made of wheatgerm, soya and lecithin, and embraced plastic surgery, could not hold back the years forever. In 2009 he was diagnosed with leukaemia.

Vidal Sassoon was married four times and freely admitted that his first three marriages were casualties of his workaholism and ambition. He married his first wife, Elaine Wood, his salon receptionist, in 1956; his second, the actress Beverly Adams, in 1967. They had a son and two daughters of whom one, Catya, died of a drug overdose in 2002, a tragedy that haunted Sassoon for the last years of his life. They also adopted another son. He and Beverly divorced in 1980. His third wife was Jeanette Hartford-Davis, a dressage champion and former model. In 1992, he married Rhonda, who survives him with his three children.

Vidal Sassoon, born January 17 1928, died May 9 2012