The picture is a simple one. Lulu and John Frieda stand side by side, both smiling at something off to the side of the camera, his arm resting around her shoulders like it had every right to be there. The Scottish singer, now 78, posted it to Instagram after the celebrity hairstylist died at 75, and she called it “Our last photo together,” followed by five words that said what the photo already showed: “A lifetime of memories. Rip Johnny.”
The two had been divorced for more than three decades, yet the post drew a heart from David Furnish, Elton John’s husband, and “Sending you lots of love” from broadcaster Gabby Logan, according to People. It also sent a lot of us back to the girl who belted “Shout” in 1964 and to the young hairdresser she married, a man who went on to put a bottle of Frizz-Ease in millions of American bathrooms. Their story did not end the way most celebrity divorces do, and the last chapter belongs to both of them.
Lulu Had Already Lived a Whole Career Before She Met John Frieda
Born Marie Lawrie in Lennoxtown, Scotland, on November 3, 1948, Lulu was only 15 when “Shout” made her a star in Britain. American audiences met her in 1967, when she played a student opposite Sidney Poitier in To Sir, with Love and sang the title song, which spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the biggest-selling single in the country that year. Two years later she tied for first place at the Eurovision Song Contest with “Boom Bang-a-Bang,” one of four songs that finished level on 18 votes.
That same whirlwind year of 1969, she married Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees. They were young and famous and, by her own account, not built to last, and the marriage was over by the mid-1970s. We covered how lost Lulu felt after her marriage to Maurice Gibb, and it explains why she was in no hurry to try again. “John came as a surprise to me because I wasn’t looking for him or anyone else,” she said, as Hello! recounted. “I was shattered after Maurice. I was nervous to take the plunge again.”
She took it anyway. Lulu and Frieda married in London in the mid-1970s, and their son, Jordan, was born in 1977. Jordan, now 49, grew up to become an actor. Meanwhile his mother kept working, and in 1974 she recorded the title song for the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun. Her husband was about to become famous in his own right.
The Schoolboy Haircut That Built John Frieda’s Empire
Frieda was born in London on July 9, 1951, the son of a hairdresser, and he learned the trade as a teenager at Leonard of Mayfair. In 1976, Joanna Lumley asked him for a schoolboy’s haircut for her role as Purdey in The New Avengers. The glossy bowl cut he gave her became one of the most copied hairstyles in Britain, and at 25 he opened his own salon.
The bigger idea came in the bathroom cabinet rather than the salon chair. Working with American executive Gail Federici, he developed a serum for unruly hair called Frizz-Ease, which reached American stores in 1990, according to CNN. It turned a London stylist into a household name in the United States. In 2002, Japan’s Kao Corporation bought the John Frieda hair care company for a reported $450 million, a deal the Financial Times covered at the time.
By then, though, Lulu was no longer at his side. And the reasons, as she later told it, began years before the money arrived.
Why Did Lulu and John Frieda Split?
Lulu has dated the trouble to a painful loss. “I think John left me in 1988 when I lost the baby,” she said in remarks recounted by the Mirror. “I was in denial of my marriage going wrong. I didn’t see us drifting apart.” The couple separated in 1991, after nearly 15 years of marriage.
She has also been frank about the business she walked away from. “John had always looked after the money side of things. I was happy to hand all that responsibility over to him,” she said, adding that friends later felt she should have had a stake in his company from the start. “John never offered and I didn’t press him.” She called that period “excruciating.”
Frieda, who rarely spoke about the breakup, took his share of the blame. He admitted he had been young and touchy about being known as “Mr. Lulu.” Lulu went on to the biggest comeback of her career when “Relight My Fire,” recorded with Take That, gave her a UK No. 1 in 1993, and the same year Tina Turner turned “I Don’t Wanna Fight,” a song Lulu co-wrote with her brother Billy Lawrie, into an international hit. Frieda later married Avery Agnelli, the widow of Fiat heir Giovanni Alberto Agnelli. Yet he and Lulu kept something between them that the divorce never touched.
What Lulu Wrote After Losing Him
Frieda’s death was announced on Tuesday, November 3, on his salon’s Instagram account, which said he “passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family.” It was the same day Lulu turned 78. No cause of death was released, CNN reported. He is survived by his wife, four children including Jordan, and two grandchildren.
When Lulu finally spoke in public, she kept it short. She shared the photo of the two of them taken earlier this year, wrote “A lifetime of memories,” and signed off with the nickname only someone who had known him half a century would use. “Rip Johnny.”
She is still working at 78, with a new album, Let the Girl Sing Out, due in January 2027, and that brief caption may be all she ever says. Frieda said the rest himself years ago. Speaking to The Times, as People recalled this week, he called his first wife “an incredible person” and said the feeling never went away. “I never stopped loving her,” he said. “She’s the mother of my son. She’s a great person.”
