Vidal Sassoon (17 January 1928 – 9 May 2012) was a British hairstylist, businessman, and philanthropist. He was noted for repopularising a simple, close-cut geometric hairstyle called the bob cut, worn by famous 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 football player, 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 with his profits. Vidal Sassoon: The Movie, a documentary film about his life, was released in 2010. In 2009, Sassoon was appointed CBE by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. 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 Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover to celebrate the British cultural figures of the last 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 Ukraine 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. They then moved to Shepherd's Bush, which contained a community of Greek Jews. Sassoon had a younger brother, Ivor, who died from a heart attack at the age of 46. His father abandoned the family for another woman when Vidal was three years old. With his mother now unable to support the family, they fell into poverty and were evicted, becoming suddenly homeless. They