Basil Rathbone

Air takes five of his ten planets and only one sits in fire, with two apiece in earth and water and five of the ten mutable. The Sun, Mercury, Neptune and Pluto spread across fourteen degrees of Gemini. The record says Rathbone played Sherlock Holmes fourteen times and was one of the best swordsmen in Hollywood, which meant he lost a great many duels on screen to worse ones.

Four planets in Gemini, the sign built around knowing things and working them out, in the actor who played the most famous deductive detective in English fourteen separate times, is the placement a reader will want, and it is a resonance rather than a cause. Gemini's own cost is that it can hold two positions at once and commit to neither, which the record does not test in either direction.

Mercury sits in easy contact with Mars at four tenths of a degree, the closest usable contact here, and the reading is mental energy that goes somewhere: thinking clearly under pressure, and finishing an explanation once it has been started. Mind in easy contact with the sword, in an actor the record describes as a detective and a swordsman, is a coincidence of vocabulary doing a great deal of work. The useful half of it is the first part. A chart with five planets in air, and a mind easily supplied with drive, is a fair description of somebody who made a working life out of being quick in dialogue.

The Sun sits in hard contact with Saturn at over four fifths of a degree, identity meeting a rule that will not move: self-doubt, delay, and a difficult or absent authority, with the consolation that what gets built under it tends to last. Venus sits in mild friction with Neptune at a degree and a half, love and illusion, and sixty degrees from Saturn at two degrees, steady affection, which is the same planet pulling two ways at long orbs. His Moon sits on the twenty seventh degree of Capricorn at noon with Aquarius still possible, so it is left out, and that costs this chart one of its six closest contacts. Uranus alone was retrograde. He died in New York on 21 July 1967, at seventy five. The Moon was full that day and one hundred per cent lit, which is as exact as that phase gets, and the only contact inside half a degree was Venus in hard contact with his natal Pluto at thirteen hundredths.