Klaus Kinski

Klaus Kinski made five films with Werner Herzog, on shoots so violent that each of them later said the other had considered murder. The performances are extraordinary and the record here says plainly that the man was not a good one. Both halves of that need accounting for, and unusually, the chart softens neither.

He was born on 18 October 1926 in Sopot, on the Baltic, so he was a child through the 1930s in a German-speaking city and a teenager by the end of the war. Water holds five of his planets and fire and earth hold one each: a chart made almost entirely of feeling with nothing in it that cools. It also carries four separate stress patterns, two yods, a kite and a T-square, which is far more than most charts hold. Every one of those is an arrangement whose tension cannot resolve internally and has to be discharged outward, at somebody. That is the structural answer to how the performances and the behaviour came out of the same man: there was only ever one exit.

Venus is the planet to watch. It squares Pluto with a quarter of a degree to spare, love organised around control, and sits one hundredth of a degree off an awkward angle to his Moon, as exact as an aspect gets. Affection and domination not clearly separable, and need that could not be expressed without force arriving alongside it. His Moon is in Pisces, absorbing the mood of a room whether it wants to or not, in easy contact with Pluto a quarter of a degree off exact. Enormous sensitivity wired directly to enormous pressure with nothing in between, which describes the acting and the cruelty at the same time, and they were not two separate things.

His Sun was in Libra, the sign of charm. That is the uncomfortable part of the reading and almost certainly the accurate one: the charm was real, and it is what kept him being hired by people who knew what the shoot would be like.

He died at Lagunitas in California on 23 November 1991, at sixty five, a long way from the Baltic, on a full Moon 95% lit. Venus had come back to within five minutes of arc of the exact degree it held when he was born, and on the same day it was square his Pluto. The planet the whole chart turns on completed its circuit, and the hardest aspect it had ever made was the one it made again at the end.