Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Of her ten planets, four sit in water signs, with three in air, two in fire and one in earth. Water registers everything and air works out what to say about it; the element that would hold any of it to a fixed shape is nearly absent. The record says Waller-Bridge wrote and starred in Fleabag and created Killing Eve, and that both began as stage or spec work.

The Sun sits at twenty two degrees of Cancer with Mars a degree further on, and the Moon answers from Gemini at ten. Cancer keeps everything it is given and protects it; Gemini holds two accounts of one event at once. For a writer whose best known work is a woman speaking directly to the audience about what she is not saying to anybody in the room, a Cancer Sun and a Gemini Moon is almost too neat a reading.

Jupiter makes easy contact with Uranus four hundredths of a degree from exact, about as close as two planets get, scale and the planet that refuses the expected arrangement in complete agreement. The Sun makes the same easy contact with Saturn at under two fifths. Four of her ten planets were retrograde at her birth. In a writer making work nobody had commissioned, scale agreeing that readily with the unexpected is the aspect the whole method rests on.

Jupiter stood again on its Aquarius birth degree on 20 February 2021, at thirty five, in reverse as it was originally, and two circuits precede it. Aquarius asks what was made without permission, which for a record that names two things begun as stage or spec work is exactly the question. One planet in earth, in somebody who wrote her way in rather than waiting, is the detail that fits. Her Sun sits conjunct Mars within a degree and a half, which puts identity and drive in the same place in the protective sign, and that is where the nerve to perform her own writing comes from rather than from anything in fire.