Bohemian photographer created the Beatles’ celebrated ‘mop top’ hairdo

Astrid Kirchherr was not a hairdresser but when she washed the Brylcreem out of her boyfriend’s greasy quiff and sculpted it into a shaggy mop that flopped over his forehead until it reached his eyebrows, she created the world’s most celebrated hairstyle.

Her boyfriend was Stu Sutcliffe, the bass player in a scruffy, unknown beat group called the Beatles, who at the time were serving their musical apprenticeship in the clubs of Hamburg.

After Kirchherr had restyled Sutcliffe’s hair, George Harrison asked her to give him a similar cut. John Lennon and Paul McCartney also copied the look and had their hair cut in the style on a visit to Paris in 1961 to celebrate Lennon’s

21st birthday.

The ‘‘mop top’’ had been born, and only the Beatles’ curly-haired drummer Pete Best declined to adopt the fashion. It mattered not, for Best was soon to be replaced by Ringo Starr, who readily agreed to exchange his swept-back greasy rocker’s tresses for a new ‘‘Beatle cut’’.

Kirchherr, who has died aged 81, met the Beatles on their first visit to Hamburg in 1960. After a row one night with her boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, he had stomped off and found himself on the Reeperbahn, where he was intrigued by the music he heard coming from a club called the Kaiserkeller. Stepping inside he was mesmerised by the Beatles, who were charging their way through a set of rock’n’roll covers. Two nights later, with their tiff forgotten, he persuaded Kirchherr to go with him to the club.

She fell in love with the group at first sight – and with Sutcliffe in particular, who wore dark glasses, struck a moody pose and turned his back on the audience, not out of a nonchalant cool but to hide the fact that he was less than proficient on his instrument.

‘‘It was like a merry-go-round in my head, they looked absolutely astonishing,’’ Kirchherr told the Beatles biographer Bob Spitz. ‘‘My whole life changed in a couple of minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and to know them.’’

Kirchherr was a few years older than the Beatles and to their ingenue eyes she appeared the epitome of continental sophistication and art school chic. Sutcliffe returned to her during the group’s next break, and they swiftly became a couple. Kirchherr spoke little English and Sutcliffe even less German, so they communicated via a dictionary. He moved into her home and within weeks they had exchanged rings and were engaged. ‘‘The girl thought I was the most handsome of the lot,’’ he wrote home. ‘‘Here was I, feeling the most insipid member of the group, being told how much superior I looked – this alongside the great Romeo John Lennon and his two stalwarts Paul and

George, the Casanovas of Hamburg!’’

Astrid Kirchherr was born in Hamburg in 1938, the daughter of an executive of the German branch of Ford. During the war she was evacuated to live with cousins on the Baltic Sea, where she remembered seeing bodies washed up on the shore from ships sunk by submarines.

Back in Hamburg after Germany’s defeat, her widowed mother struggled to make ends meet, making their clothes from scraps of cloth.

By the late 1950s she was working as a photographer’s assistant, when she stepped into the Kaiserkeller and her life was changed for ever.

By April 1961 the Beatles were back in Hamburg for a three-month stint at the Top Ten Club. It was during this second stay that Kirchherr gave Sutcliffe the hairstyle that would become so famous, although she modestly declined the credit.

She had copied it, she said, from the actor Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau’s 1960 film Le Testament d’Orphee. ‘‘All my friends in art school used to run around with this sort of what you call Beatle haircut,’’ she said. However, Harrison had no doubt about the importance of her contribution. ‘‘Astrid was the one who influenced our image more than anyone else,’’ he said. ‘‘She made us look good.’’

After the Beatles’ second trip to Hamburg, Sutcliffe again stayed behind with Kirchherr, ending his tenure as ‘‘the fifth Beatle’’ and his erstwhile bandmates would never see him again: by the time the Beatles next returned there in April 1962, Sutcliffe was dead. He had collapsed during an art class and died from a cerebral haemorrhage. He was just 21.

Kirchherr remained close to the Beatles and went on holiday with Harrison, McCartney and Starr to Tenerife in 1963. The following year she was the only photographer permitted to take pictures of them while they were filming A Hard Day’s Night. But she soon gave up photography, saying her heart wasn’t in it.

Despite therapy, Kirchherr, whose two marriages ended in divorce, never got over the intensity of the 18 months she spent with Sutcliffe. ‘‘He was, and still is, the love of my life,’’ she said almost half a century after his death. ‘‘I never met another man who was so fascinating, so beautiful, so soft and well mannered.’’ –

‘‘My whole life changed in a couple of minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and to know them.’’