Alan Rickman

Alan Rickman was an English actor with a voice people recognised before the face, and the two parts he is best known for, Hans Gruber and Severus Snape, are both men whose menace is entirely in the delivery. He was born and he died in London, seventy years apart, which is rarer than it sounds for somebody whose work took him everywhere.

He was born in Hammersmith on 21 February 1946, in the first months of post-war Britain, with water taking six of his ten planets and earth none at all. A chart with that much water and no earth has a great deal to feel with and nothing to settle into, and the professional version of that is somebody who arrives at acting sideways rather than treating it as a trade. Three of those water planets sat together in Pisces, the Sun with Mercury and Venus, inside nine degrees. Pisces is the least outlined of the twelve signs, and having identity, thinking and taste all inside it describes a man with no strong instinct for what he was supposed to be: a liability in most careers and the central qualification for this one.

The voice is in the aspects. Mercury sits at an awkward angle to Pluto, within three quarters of a degree, and that is thinking that goes downward rather than along, after the pressure under a sentence instead of the sentence. Neither of his famous villains ever raises his voice. Both are frightening because of what is being withheld, and withholding is exactly what that aspect does. Venus sits at the same uncomfortable distance from Neptune, which is attachment to what cannot be had, and the Pisces group underneath is why both characters were played with something closer to sympathy than relish.

His Moon fell either at the end of Libra or the start of Scorpio. The hour was not recorded, so this site will not pick one, and the difference is real: one needs the room level, the other feels everything and shows none of it. What is not in doubt is the Sun at a hard angle to Saturn, under a degree and a half, which is identity meeting a rule that does not move. Nothing built under that aspect is flimsy, and a career whose two most famous parts are separated by more than a decade, lived out of the city it started in, was built rather than caught.

He died in London on 14 January 2016, at sixty nine, on a crescent Moon 23% lit. Neptune had come within a degree of the Venus he was born with and Mars was sitting on his Moon: the planet that dissolves things on the planet of love, and the planet of action on the planet of feeling. For a man hired repeatedly to be cold, it is a remarkably warm last sky.