Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, and the defining screen icon of Hollywood's golden age.

Born on 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles at half past nine in the morning, she had Leo rising with Neptune sitting on it. Neptune there belongs to a person nobody quite sees. Everybody who meets them meets a version of their own making and goes away satisfied. She became the most looked at woman in the world, photographed more than almost anyone who has ever lived, and her chart says that the more there was to look at, the less of her was visible.

What she needed was in other people's hands. Her Moon, which is where a person goes to feel safe, sits in the seventh house, the house of whoever you are with, so safety could not be made alone. It had to be given to her. And it sits in Aquarius, the sign that loves from a distance and steps back when somebody comes close enough to count. She needed to be held by a world that could only hold her at arm's length. Behind it Saturn is retrograde in the fourth house, which is home, and says there was no steady floor under any of it from the beginning. A woman whose safety had to be handed to her by somebody else, working in an industry that handed out approval by the week and withdrew it as fast, is a reading of the career as much as of the chart.

There is one kind thing in the chart and it is the part nobody was buying. Mars trine Saturn is craftsmanship, training, and the patience to work at something for years. She studied. She did the takes again. Of everything she was handed, that was the piece that was actually hers.

She died at her Brentwood home on 4 August 1962, aged thirty six, the hours before it still argued over. The Moon was new that night, the phase that begins something without waiting to see the whole of it, and the Sun was in Leo, the sign that had been rising when she was born. The most famous woman of her century, still mostly unseen, and remembered now for an image she never got to put down.