Jennifer Connelly

Jennifer Connelly won an Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind, which came twenty years into a career that began when she was a child, and that gap is the thing worth reading.

She was born at Cairo, in New York State, on 12 December 1970 with the Sun in Sagittarius and the Moon in Gemini, directly across the chart from one another. Those two are opposites by design: Sagittarius wants the larger horizon and the long view, Gemini wants the detail and the exchange. A Sun and Moon in opposition describes somebody permanently negotiating between the big question and the immediate one, and it is a restless rather than a comfortable arrangement.

Venus, Mars and Jupiter group together in Scorpio. Taste, drive and scale in the sign that does nothing by halves, which for an actress cast very young on the strength of a face is the half of the chart nobody was looking at: the Scorpio group is the part that wanted the difficult work.

The tightest aspect is Venus at a quiet angle to Uranus, under two thirds of a degree, which is taste in easy contact with the unconventional. Her Moon sits awkwardly against Mars by about the same distance, so feeling and drive are slightly out of step, and the Sun makes a hard angle to Mars as well. Nothing in the chart lets the aggression settle, and a career of parts about women under enormous strain is where it has gone.

Twenty years between a first film and a first award is what a Sun opposed by the Moon tends to produce: not a stalled career but a continually renegotiated one, where the question of what the work is for keeps getting reopened.

Her Jupiter return fell in October 2018, at forty seven, and on a chart organised around an opposition, expansion arrives as a wider gap rather than as a resolution.