James Dean

James Dean made three films, only one of which came out while he was alive, and changed what a young man was permitted to be on screen. He was killed in a car crash at twenty four. Almost everything he is famous for happened after he was dead, and a chart cannot know that, but it can account for why so little work went so far.

He was born on 8 February 1931 in Marion, Indiana, in the second winter of the Depression, with the Sun in Aquarius: an identity built on not being told. Aquarius sounds airy and is in practice immovable, and its real cost is that being different stops being a consequence of what you think and becomes the point. Post-war American film had no register for that. The parts he was given were written as delinquency and he played them as principle, which is the difference between a trend and a permanent change.

Cardinal signs holds six of his planets signs and one in a mutable sign, so the chart starts things and does not bend afterwards. Three stood together in Capricorn: Mercury, Venus and Saturn. That is a sober, ageing, responsible arrangement to find in a man who never reached twenty five, and it is the part of him that reads on film as somebody much older than the character he is playing.

The two tightest aspects are both uncomfortable and both about frustration. Venus is two minutes of arc off an awkward angle to Mars, which puts wanting and going after it permanently out of step. The Sun is a fifth of a degree off the same angle to Pluto, a self organised around something it will not release. His Moon was in Scorpio, which feels at full depth and shows almost none of it, and Scorpio is where the Moon is least at home: not cold, but feeling with nowhere to sit. That is three separate accounts of unexpressed pressure in one person, which is the whole of what he put on screen and the reason it landed on an audience of teenagers who had no language for it either.

He died near Cholame, California, on 30 September 1955, on a gibbous Moon 99% lit. Saturn stood square his Sun, half a degree off, and Uranus, the planet of sudden events, was within three quarters of a degree of his Mars, the planet of speed. The Sun that day was in Libra, air, the same element it stood in at his birth. The slow planets had barely moved since 1931. He had a chart built for a long argument with the world and twenty four years in which to have it.