Alec Guinness

Not one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign. Air takes five of the ten, water three and fire two, with four cardinal and four mutable. Neptune was the only retrograde planet, on the twenty sixth degree of Cancer. The record says Guinness played eight members of one family in Kind Hearts and Coronets, won an Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai, took two per cent of Star Wars, and regretted the fame it brought.

The Sun sits sixty degrees from Uranus at just over a degree, and the reading arrives in two clauses: people who are unusual and untroubled by being unusual, and sudden opportunities that suit them. The record's third fact is a famous sudden opportunity and its fourth fact is the word regretted. The opportunity suited the arrangement and not the man, which is the sort of split a two clause reading can be held to and usually fails.

Mercury sits in quiet contact with Jupiter at under two thirds of a degree, the tightest usable contact in the chart, and the reading is that learning comes easily: breadth, genuine curiosity, and an ability to make complicated things sound simple. An actor is not in the business of explaining things, so the third clause has nowhere to land, and the first two describe a reader rather than a trade. Eight separate parts in one film is the record's own evidence for breadth, and it is better evidence than the contact is.

His Moon sits on the twenty seventh degree of Gemini at noon with Cancer still possible, so it is left out, and with it go both of the two closest contacts in the chart and the only group of planets it had in one sign. No planet at all in earth, in a man the record introduces by a technical feat, is a count worth one line. Venus sits square Neptune at a degree and a quarter, love and illusion: disappointment built in from the start, which the record gives nothing to test. He died at Midhurst on 5 August 2000, at eighty six. The transiting Sun stood sixty degrees from his natal Saturn at nine hundredths of a degree that day and the Moon opposite his natal Venus at a third. The Moon was a crescent at thirty four per cent, a phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done.