Michael Caine

Michael Caine was born Maurice Micklewhite in Rotherhithe, in dockside south London, on 14 March 1933, and won an Academy Award in each of two different decades, which means the career had a second half rather than one long first one. He made Alfie and Get Carter keeping the accent he was born with, at a point when British leading men were expected to lose it.

His Sun is at twenty three degrees of Pisces, the sign with the least fixed outline of the twelve. People born with it there are often described more accurately by others than by themselves, and the standing hazard is drift: a Pisces Sun with nothing to be devoted to gets carried along by whatever is nearest. A working class boy in 1930s London had very few means of choosing a shape, and the one he took was a different name. Deciding on an identity rather than receiving one is the Pisces option that is not drift, and he then spent sixty years being that decision.

Mars is the busy planet. It makes hard angles to both Pluto and Uranus, a third of a degree off one and two thirds off the other, so drive meets force and then meets disruption. That pair belongs to somebody whose aggression is real, is controlled and works best unraised, which is exactly the register of Get Carter: a quiet man in a good coat, and nothing in the performance is loud. Three of his planets sit together in Virgo, Mars among them, and five of the ten are retrograde, which gives the chart a private, careful quality the public manner never advertised.

A T-square holds his Moon, Uranus and Pluto, so emotional life is wired into the two heaviest planets available with no comfortable resolution between them. Uranus and Pluto are themselves a third of a degree from a square, which belongs to his whole generation rather than to him, but having the Moon pulled in makes it personal: the man who never seemed troubled has the most pressured part of his chart sitting precisely where it would not show.

Maurice Micklewhite and Michael Caine are one Pisces Sun handled two ways, one name given and one decided on. A sign with no fixed outline is unusually well served by having two.