Frances Farmer

Earth holds four of her ten planets, water three, air two and a single one fire. Earth builds and water registers; the element that would charge at a thing is down to one planet. The record says Farmer was an American actress and that her institutionalisation became notorious. It gives no account of it, and neither does this.

The Sun sits at twenty six degrees of Virgo with Mercury on the twenty ninth degree of the same sign, so identity and speech sit together near the very end of the sign built on doing something properly and being useful. The Moon answers from Taurus at thirteen, needing the physical basics in place before anything else can happen. Mars, Neptune and Pluto spread right across Cancer. For an actress whose record is one sentence about her work and one about what happened to her, a Virgo Sun that applies its standard hardest to itself is the placement to start from.

Saturn sits in hard contact with Uranus at just under four fifths of a degree, which is the standing reading of order against revolt: the fight between security and freedom, and frustration with rules that serve nobody. That is the aspect's meaning in any chart and it is not an explanation of anything. Mars sits conjunct Pluto at just over a degree, overwhelming force and immense stamina. The Moon sits in hard contact with Mercury at two thirds, what is felt and what is said pulling apart. Uranus alone was retrograde at her birth.

She died at Indianapolis on 1 August 1970, at fifty six. Mercury rules her Virgo Sun, and that day it sat sixty degrees from her natal Mars at seven hundredths of a degree, the closest contact in that sky, and the same from her natal Pluto at just over a degree. Pluto itself stood conjunct her natal Sun at three quarters of a degree. The Moon was balsamic and entirely unlit, the phase that finishes things, lets them go and is already looking past them.