Eric Bana

Eric Bana was a stand-up comedian before he was an actor, which is a harder transition than it sounds: the skills barely overlap and the audience does not forget.

He was born in Melbourne on 9 August 1968 with the Sun, Mercury and Mars grouped in Leo and four more planets gathered in Virgo. Leo performs; Virgo checks the work. Having identity, speech and drive in the first and taste, scale, disruption and pressure in the second describes somebody who is comfortable in front of a room and privately exacting about what he does there. Four planets in fire and four in earth, with one each in air and water, makes a chart that both wants the stage and treats it as a trade.

The chart carries two yods, one across his Moon, Saturn and Uranus and one across Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. A yod has no natural outlet, and two of them sharing Saturn and Uranus means the same pair of planets, structure and disruption, keeps generating tension that cannot resolve internally. His Moon squares Neptune by three fifths of a degree, which is feeling tied to the planet with no outline: an emotional register that is strong and difficult to name, and the opposite of a comic's clarity.

Mercury and Jupiter sit awkwardly against Saturn, so the funny half and the ambitious half both meet the same brake. A comedian who stops doing comedy has usually run into exactly that, and the career since has been built on parts that need weight rather than timing.

What has survived the career change is the Virgo group. A comedian who becomes a serious actor needs the part of himself that was never really joking, and four planets in the sign of doing it properly is where that came from. The comedy is not something he abandoned; it is the reason the serious parts have any lightness in them at all.