The man who shaped the best-tressed list

Elizabeth Taylor was one of Alexandre's star-studded clientele.

In 1962, Elizabeth Taylor fell seriously ill while making the blockbuster movie Cleopatra in London. What thing, or person, she was asked on her sick-bed, could make her feel better? She replied, instantly: "Bring me Alexandre."

"Alexandre" was not a lover or a doctor or a friend or a pet or a child. He was a hairdresser of the highest order, the man who turned women's, and occasionally men's, hair into an ephemeral art form.

For half a century, "Alexandre de Paris", who died this month at the age of 85, was hairdresser to the royal, the rich and the celebrated: from the Duchess of Windsor (one of his first clients), to Claudia Schiffer, via Princess Grace, Princess Margaret and Greta Garbo.

Alexandre was born as Louis Alexandre Raimon in St Tropez in September 1922. He was still dressing the hair of his final clients - Sophia Loren and the Countess of Paris, wife of the pretender to the French throne - into his 80s. He retired to his birthplace three years ago where he died.

Alexandre was a wiry man with a 1930s-style pencil moustache. He was once memorably described as looking "like a cross between a P.G. Wodehouse character and Salvador Dali". Although high camp in style and conversation, and a close friend of the bisexual French writer and artist Jean Cocteau, Alexandre was married with two children.

For more than 50 years, he catered to the most glittering of client lists - he was the Duchess of Windsor's hairdresser for 30 years; Sophia Loren is said to have had more than 500 appointments with him; Greta Garbo was a client but also "a friend".

He also dressed the hair of Jackie Kennedy, Maria Callas, Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Liza Minnelli, Shirley MacLaine, and Romy Schneider.

Fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier called him Alexandre the Great. Paco Duffo, Alexandre's assistant for 30 years, before setting up his own salon in Barcelona, once said of his mentor: "There are a lot of barbers and few hairdressers ... Monsieur Alexandre makes love with hair ... He is so quick with his fingers: I pass him pins and it is as though they grow from his fingertips - it's magic."

Alexandre described the secret of his success more succinctly: "Never disappoint a woman."

As a young man, his parents, restaurateurs in St Tropez, wanted him to be a doctor. But the young Alexandre was interested in only one part of the human anatomy: hair.

As a small child, he would practise hairstyles on his grandmother's waist-length blonde locks. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to Antoine de Paris, one of the most celebrated society hairdressers of his day.