Manoj Bajpai

Manoj Bajpai made Satya and The Family Man and has won national awards, which in Indian film is the mark of the actor the industry respects rather than the one it sells.

He was born at Narkatiaganj, in Bihar, on 23 April 1969 with three separate yods. A yod is two planets in easy contact both pulling awkwardly at a third, with no comfortable resolution anywhere in it, and three in one chart is genuinely uncommon. Two of the three involve Saturn and Neptune, which is structure against the thing that will not hold a shape, and the third pulls his Moon and Mercury against Mars. Feeling, speech and drive locked together with no outlet.

That is an uncomfortable chart and a very useful one for the work he does. An actor whose register is interiority rather than display needs tension that cannot be discharged, because discharged tension plays as melodrama and trapped tension plays as a person.

Five of his ten planets are retrograde, including Venus, Jupiter and Pluto, so half the chart runs inward and arrives late. Four planets sit in earth with a single one in air, which is practical, durable and short of the faculty that stands back and comments. His Moon makes a creative angle to Jupiter half a degree off, the one easy thing here: warmth and scale working as skill rather than struggle, and probably the reason the severity is watchable.

The Sun is at the very start of Taurus, under three degrees in, the sign at its most accumulative: it holds what it has and does not let go. Thirty years in one industry without ever being its leading man is that Sun being patient rather than overlooked.

Thirty years of being the critic's actor rather than the box office's is what three yods and five retrogrades look like when somebody keeps working anyway. His Jupiter return came in August 2016, at forty seven, and the decade since has been the one the wider audience finally arrived for.