Marcello Mastroianni

Marcello Mastroianni was the face of Italian cinema for forty years, in La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, and was famously irritated at being called a Latin lover. The irritation is the useful fact. A man who spent four decades being described by other people and objected to the description has a particular relationship with being looked at, and the chart is specific about it.

He was born on 28 September 1924 at Fontana Liri, a hill town between Rome and Naples, with the Sun in Libra. Libra does not work out who it is in isolation, it does it in relation to whoever is in the room, and its standing difficulty is not knowing what it wants when the room is empty. For a performer that is a professional advantage and a personal problem at once, and it goes a long way to explaining both why a label stuck to him so hard and why it bothered him so much.

The closest aspect in the chart is the Sun to Venus, two minutes of arc from the hardest angle those two can make, since Venus never travels far enough from the Sun to square it. Taste and self-worth slightly out of step: a man who could see precisely what was elegant and was not convinced it described him. Hold that next to a working life spent as the best dressed man in European film and the complaint about the label looks less like modesty and more like accuracy.

Venus is busy in both directions. It makes a creative angle to Saturn, which is affection that prefers the durable to the exciting, and an awkward one to Uranus, which is the reverse: closeness and freedom colliding, something stable unsettled because it had gone predictable. Both are in the chart at once, and a romantic reputation manufactured in 1960s Italy around a man carrying both of those was always going to fit worse than the publicity suggested.

Mercury sits in Virgo under a degree from a hard angle to Saturn, a mind that reads its own uncertainty as stupidity when it is usually care. A single planet sits in earth, so there is almost nothing in the chart that grounds any of this. He died in Paris on 19 December 1996, at seventy two, out of Italy at the end as well as at the start of the career.

Two films are still the shorthand for a whole national cinema, and he spent the rest of a working life declining to be the man they had made him.