Legendary hairstylist Vidal Sassoon died of "apparent natural causes" at his Los Angeles home Wednesday morning, a Los Angeles police spokesman said. Vidal Sassoon is dead at age 84, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Sassoon, often referred to as the "founder of hairdressing," is credited with pioneering the bob haircut and launched a sprawling network of salons around the world. He was found dead in his Mulholland Drive home; authorities told the LA Times he died of an "unspecified illness."
Sassoon was reportedly fighting leukemia as of last year, after being diagnosed with blood cancer in 2009.
Police were called to Sassoon's Bel Air home on Mulholland Drive at 10:30 a.m., spokesman Kevin Maiberger said.
"When officers arrived, there were family members at the residence," Maiberger said.
Sassoon, a British native, is credited with revolutionizing women's hair in the 1960s after a childhood that included several years in a London orphanage. His father had left, and his mother could not afford to care for him.
Sassoon grew up in England, where his mother, a single parent, placed Sassoon and his brother in a Jewish orphanage for seven years when she couldn't provide for the family, as Sassoon told the Telegraph in a 2011 interview:
"First of all what we truly have to look at is the situation. I was born in 1928 and by 1931 the Depression was beginning to mount. My father had left us, my brother, and myself. We were in Shepherd's Bush, but we were being evicted, we had nowhere to go."
Later, after his mother dreamed of her son being in a barbershop, she apprenticed him to a local barber. That began a career that saw him develop two classic hairstyles of the 1960s, the bob and the even shorter five-point cut, along with an eponymous hair care line, a range of hair care tools and a chain of salons.
Later, Sassoon fought in the Israeli army before beginning training as a hairdresser. He opened his first salon in London in 1954 and launched his own line of products in 1973 with the now-famous slogan, "If you don't look good, we don't look good."
"At the very beginning, the only thing I was truly interested in was changing the craft of hairdressing into a cutting art form, where we created shapes to the body structure and bone structure to bring out the very best that we could, that I knew how, in an individual face," Sassoon told CNN in a 1998 interview.
After "a sucession of lucky breaks" starting in the early 1960s, Sassoon found himself in a 1964 show in New York. The following day, he met with Richard Salomon, CEO of the beauty product company Charles of the Ritz, who brought him to the United States.
Sassoon is most famous for the pixie cut he gave Mia Farrow for the famous film "Rosemary's Baby," which he says was necessary: "When I got to her there were bits that were about an inch and bits that were 10in. She didn't tell me what had happened. Her bone structure was beautiful. I told her that we had to go very short."
"He said, 'I'll tell you what: I'll buy a building on Madison Avenue, you go home train a team, send me your architect, we'll open next year.' And we did, on a handshake," Sassoon recounted. "So those lucky breaks do happen, but obviously, he liked what I did."
Queen Elizabeth made Sassoon a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for his services to the British hairdressing industry.
Sassoon is survived by his fourth wife Ronnie. He had four children; Catya, a mother of three, died in 2002 at age 33 of a drug-induced heart attack.
