Marlene Dietrich

Not one of her ten planets sits in a water sign. Earth takes five, air three and fire two, and five of the ten are cardinal. The Sun, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars all sit in Capricorn, spread across twenty four degrees of it. The record says Dietrich left Germany, took American citizenship, spent the war entertaining Allied troops at the front, which many Germans never forgave, and lived her last eleven years in bed in Paris.

Saturn sits at an awkward angle to Pluto at under a fifth of a degree, and the reading is pressure against pressure: periods of severe constraint, confrontation with power, and the enforced ending of something that had lasted a long time. Confrontation with power is the record's second and third facts taken together, since changing citizenship and then singing for the other side's army is a confrontation conducted in public. The caveat is large enough to go first, though: both planets are slow, and everybody born across those years carries the contact.

Five planets in Capricorn is the structure worth naming, and the sign's reading is built on competence and on having actually done the thing. It also carries a claim that Capricorn ages in reverse, heavier at twenty than at sixty, and the record's last sentence is eleven years in bed, which runs the other way. A woman who performed at the front in her forties and then stopped leaving a room in her seventies did not get lighter, and a chart saying she should have is a chart being contradicted by a biography.

The Sun sits in mild friction with Venus at nine hundredths of a degree, taste and self-worth slightly out of step, which is the hardest angle those two can make, since Venus never moves far enough from the Sun to do anything stronger. Venus sits in quiet contact with Jupiter at just over a fifth, ease and goodwill. Her Moon sits on the second degree of Leo at noon with Cancer still possible, so it is left out, and the chart's tightest contact goes with it. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. She died in Paris on 6 May 1992, at ninety. Saturn stood sixty degrees from her natal Uranus at nine hundredths of a degree that day and Uranus conjunct her natal Saturn at three quarters, the two planets standing on each other's birth places. The Moon was a crescent at sixteen per cent.