Bette Davis

Bette Davis took the unlikeable parts nobody else wanted and sued her own studio over the contract that owned her. She lost the case. She was nominated ten times and won twice, and the losing is the more useful half of the record, because it is the part the chart predicts.

She was born on 5 April 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town, with the Sun in Aries. Aries needs something to push against and will manufacture an opponent if nothing is supplied. In her case the opponent was structural: a woman under contract in the 1930s studio system had no mechanism at all for refusing the work she was handed, and she went to court about it anyway, which is the sign doing the only thing it knows how to do with an immovable object.

The Sun is a degree and a third off a square to Uranus and forms a T-square with Uranus and Neptune, two planets facing each other with a third pulling at right angles and nowhere for the pressure to go. Sun square Uranus is the urge to break out arriving at the worst available moment, and it produces a life of abrupt reversals rather than a climb. Ten nominations spread across five decades, with two wins and a lawsuit in the middle, is that shape rather than a career arc.

Venus and Mars sit together within a degree, so wanting a thing and going at it were one motion for her. Her Moon is in Gemini, which works out a feeling by saying it aloud and is not sure what it feels until it has heard itself. An Aries Sun and a Gemini Moon together make somebody who can be furious and articulate at the same time, and she was paid for both: the parts she chose needed a woman who could be unpleasant in words rather than in silence, which almost nobody was being asked to do on film then.

The one easy thing in the chart is her Moon to Neptune, four minutes of arc from exact. For a performer whose method was to be difficult on screen and difficult off it, the softest aspect she owns is the one tying feeling to imagination, and it is why the difficult parts were never merely shrill. She died at Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris, on 6 October 1989, at eighty one, a long way from the mill town.

She lost the case, and the contract system she lost it to no longer exists. That is the usual way a T-square resolves: not by winning but by outlasting.