Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep is the most nominated performer in the history of the Academy Awards, and what she is known for is accents and characters that leave no trace of the one before. That is a specific professional identity: not a presence that recurs, but a capacity to vacate.

She was born on 22 June 1949 in Summit, New Jersey, with the Sun barely inside Cancer, fifty two minutes of arc into the sign. Cancer builds identity around belonging to something and looking after it, and its characteristic cost is defining itself so completely by who it cares for that its own wants get mislaid. Set that next to a working method that consists of being entirely occupied by somebody else for a year at a time and the two stop looking unrelated: the same instinct that mislays its own preferences is the one that can be fully taken over.

The Sun is conjunct Uranus within eight minutes of arc, closer than anything else in the chart and the most unusual thing in it. Uranus is the planet of not being the same as last time, and fused to the Sun that tightly it makes the identity itself the variable rather than the constant. Most long careers are built on an audience knowing what it is getting. Hers was built on the opposite, and that aspect is the mechanism: a self that reconstitutes instead of repeating. Both planets sit in a group in Cancer with Venus, which is why the reinvention has warmth in it and does not read as technique.

There are two yods in the chart and both hold Jupiter and Saturn, expansion and limit. A yod has no natural outlet, so the same pair appearing in both describes a long unresolved argument about how much to take on and how much to decline, which across fifty years of being offered everything is not an abstract problem. There is one planet in fire, the element of self-assertion, and her Moon is in Taurus, the sign it is most at home in. The steadiness is private and the variability is the work.

December 2020 brought her Jupiter return, at seventy one. Twelve years open at a Jupiter return, and they open as an offer rather than an event: somebody has to take them up. For a woman with two yods built out of Jupiter, being offered more is the harder of the two things that could happen.