Matt Smith

Matt Smith is an English actor. He played the eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who, and Prince Philip in The Crown.

Born on 28 October 1982 in Northampton, he has the Sun in Scorpio and the Moon in Pisces, four of his ten planets in water and not one in earth. That is a chart with no practical surface to stand behind. Scorpio keeps its own counsel and gives very little away. Pisces takes in the mood of a room whether it wants to or not, and then has to work out afterwards which of the feelings were even its own. Together they describe somebody who feels a great deal and shows almost none of it, which is a hard way to go through an ordinary day and an extraordinarily useful way to make a living as an actor. All that feeling has to go somewhere, and a part is the one place it is allowed out on purpose.

The spine of the chart is Saturn sitting with Pluto, inside a degree, with Mars in easy contact with both. Saturn with Pluto is endurance and unglamorous work, and the experience of being shaped by circumstances nobody would have chosen. Mars easy to both is strength that never needs to announce itself, and the uncommon ability to keep doing one thing long after the interesting part of it is over. That is most of what the job actually is. Acting is not the two minutes anybody remembers, it is the fortieth take of the same half page at five in the morning, months of it, a year of it, and giving the fortieth exactly what you gave the first. It is sitting in a trailer for six hours to work for twenty minutes. Not one planet was retrograde on the day he was born, which is unusual and reads as somebody with nothing in him pulling backwards.

It is a combination far better suited to carrying weight than to being adored for carrying it, which is worth noticing in an actor whose two best known parts are both inherited rather than invented. The Doctor arrives secondhand, with every previous version already in the audience's head and most of them beloved. Prince Philip spent a life standing one step behind somebody else. Neither part can be played by being charming at it. Both ask somebody to take something that already belongs to other people, carry it carefully for years, and hand it on in better condition than they found it, which is Saturn and Pluto almost word for word.

Four planets in water and none at all in earth belongs to somebody who will always feel a great deal more than he shows, and that gap between the two is the whole of the instrument. It does not close with age. It is the reason the work stays the steady thing while everything around it keeps moving.