Maureen O'Sullivan

Not one of her ten planets sits in a fire sign. Earth takes five, water four and a single one air, with four of the ten cardinal and four fixed. The Sun, Mercury and Saturn spread across seventeen degrees of Taurus, and Uranus sits on the last degree of Capricorn, retrograde. The record gives two facts: she played Jane in six Tarzan films, and she was Mia Farrow's mother.

The Moon sits in easy contact with Saturn at eight hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is emotional steadiness: people who are reliable in a crisis and who do not require much reassurance. Both planets sit in earth signs, the Moon certain at twelve degrees of Capricorn and Saturn at twelve of Taurus, and with five of the ten in earth and none at all in fire that is the most consistent thing this chart has to say about itself. In an actress the record places in six films and one family, earth and steadiness are very nearly the whole of what the chart has to offer.

The record deserves a sentence of its own, because it defines O'Sullivan by one part played six times and by a relation to her daughter, and no amount of chart reading supplies what it leaves out. A reading about being reliable in a crisis, landed on a record of that shape, says nothing about whether the six films or the relation was the larger part of a life, and this entry is not going to guess at it. Mars sits in easy contact with Neptune at a degree and a half, effort with imagination behind it, which is the nearest thing here to a reading about performing.

Saturn sits in mild friction with Pluto at fifteen hundredths of a degree, pressure against pressure: periods of severe constraint, and the enforced ending of something that had lasted a long time. Mercury sits in direct opposition to Jupiter at a degree and a quarter, scale outrunning accuracy, and Mercury itself was retrograde on the ninth degree of Taurus. Mercury, Jupiter and Uranus were the three retrograde planets. She died at Scottsdale on 23 June 1998, at eighty seven. Venus stood in easy contact with her natal Uranus at fifteen hundredths of a degree that day, Uranus in hard contact with her natal Saturn at under four tenths, and Jupiter in hard contact with her natal Pluto at under half. The Moon was balsamic and nought per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.