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LOS ANGELES - Vidal Sassoon, a celebrity hair stylist who parlayed his success in the salon into a huge business putting his name on numerous hair design products, has died at his home in Los Angeles at age 84, according to Los Angeles police.
Police said they responded to a call at 1:30 p.m. EDT to a residence in Los Angeles and on arrival confirmed that Vidal Sassoon was deceased.
"It was of apparent natural causes and there is no crime scene," Los Angeles police spokesman Kevin Maiberger said in a statement. "When the officers arrived there were family members at the residence."
Sassoon, who was born in London and whose scissors spelled the end of the beehive and the bouffant hair styles of the 1950s, earned international fame and fortune with groundbreaking styles including the "bob."
He went from being a stylist in the salon to licensing his name for hair design products that were sold around the world, earning him millions of dollars.
Sassoon, who was referred to by some as the "founder of hairdressing", had reportedly been fighting leukemia, according to the LA Times, although no further details were immediately available on the cause of death.
The flamboyant hairstylist, who launched a successful hair-care product range with the slogan "If you don't look good, we don't look good," had lived in the United States since the 1980s.
He was famed for the so-called "wash and wear" cuts, easy to maintain, as opposed to the rigid hairstyles of earlier eras.
"When I first came into hair, women were coming in and you'd place a hat on their hair and you'd dress their hair around it," he told the LA Times in a 1999 interview.
"We learned to put discipline in the haircuts by using actual geometry, actual architectural shapes and bone structure. The cut had to be perfect and layered beautifully, so that when a woman shook it, it just fell back in."
Born to Jewish parents in London, Sassoon spent seven years in a Jewish orphanage after his father, Jack Sassoon, abandoned his family for another woman, according to the IMDb movie industry database.
His father's family was from Thessalonniki, Greece and his mother's family was from Spain.
He was evacuated to the English countryside during World War II, and fought for Israeli in Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He later founded the Vidal Sassoon International Study for Anti-Semitism.
Sassoon opened his first salon in 1954 in London, and his career took off in the swinging 60s, when his clients included Mia Farrow for "Rosemary's Baby" in 1968 and Glenda Jackson for her Oscar-winning role in 1969's "Women in Love."
A 2010 documentary "Vidal Sassoon: The Movie" explored his life from London's impoverished East End via an orphanage to his fame and fortune as hairdresser to the stars.
Sassoon, who married four times, was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2009 Queen's Birthday Honors List for his services to British hairdressing and charity.
He was a life-long fan of Chelsea Football Club.
Sassoon is survived by his fourth wife Rhonda and three children from a previous marriage.
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