Fred Astaire

Fire takes five of his ten planets, air three, and a single one each in earth and water, with five of the ten mutable. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus were the three retrograde planets. The record says Astaire insisted on full body shots in single takes so the audience could see the dancing was real, and that his first screen test report supposedly said: cannot act, cannot sing, balding, can dance a little.

Mercury sits in easy contact with Saturn at a degree and a fifth, and the reading is structured thinking without strain: organisation, patience and long concentration. A single unbroken take of a whole dance, filmed from head to foot, is long concentration and organisation in the most literal sense available, because there is nowhere inside it to hide a mistake and no editing afterwards to cover one. That is the contact in this chart the record was made for.

Mercury also sits sixty degrees from Neptune at under three fifths of a degree, the closest usable contact here, intuitive understanding: picking things up without being told, and an ear for what somebody means rather than for what they said. In a dancer the word ear is doing accidental work, and the clause about picking things up without being told is the usable half. A single planet in earth, in a man whose art was physical control, is the count that cuts the other way, and earth in a chart is a temperament rather than a body.

Saturn sits in direct opposition to Neptune at under two thirds of a degree, structure dissolving: disillusionment, and the slow discovery that something relied upon was not solid, and that is a slow pair shared with everybody born across those years. His Moon sits on the second degree of Gemini at noon with Taurus still possible, so it is left out, and a three planet group goes with it. He died at Los Angeles on 22 June 1987, at eighty eight. Mercury stood square his natal Venus at a third of a degree that day. The Moon was balsamic and eleven per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.