Cicely Tyson

Mars sits eight arcminutes into Aries and Jupiter nineteen arcminutes into Capricorn, so two of her ten planets are at the very start of a sign. Water takes four, fire three, earth two and a single one air, with five of the ten cardinal. The record says Tyson refused parts she considered demeaning for years at real cost, won two Emmys for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and published a memoir at ninety six, two days before she died.

Mercury sits in direct opposition to Pluto at one hundredth of a degree, which is as exact as this project ever prints, and the reading is thought becoming compulsion: rumination, using knowledge as leverage, and suspicion that outruns the evidence. None of that is in the record. What the record describes is the opposite kind of leverage: refusing work, for years, at a cost she absorbed herself, which is withholding rather than wielding. The orb is remarkable and the reading is wrong, and both of those belong in the same breath.

Mars sits square Jupiter at under a fifth of a degree, action outrunning sense: overreaching, and taking a risk because it is available rather than because it is wise. For an actress who turned work down on principle, taking a risk because it was available is again the inverse, and the risk she took lay in not taking them. This chart is unusually consistent in describing somebody the record does not contain.

Her Moon sits on the first degree of Libra at noon with Virgo still possible, so it is left out, and both of the chart's T-squares go with it, because both run through that Moon. Mercury, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. She died in New York on 28 January 2021, at ninety six. Mars stood in direct opposition to her natal Saturn at under a fifth of a degree that day. The Moon was one hundred per cent lit, and the phase reading printed for it refines, questions and improves, and rarely calls anything finished, which in somebody who published a book two days before dying at ninety six is the one line in this entry needing no argument at all.