Robert Altman

A single one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign. Water takes four, earth three and air two, with five of the ten fixed. The chart holds a mystic rectangle on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto, which is two oppositions braced by easy contacts, and not one of its four corners is the Moon, so it survives an unknown birth hour where most figures in this set do not. The record says Altman let actors talk over each other and improvise, which nobody did, made MASH, Nashville and The Player, and revealed at his honorary Oscar that he had had a heart transplant a decade earlier.

Mercury sits in direct opposition to Neptune at under half a degree, and the reading is that thinking gets misty: confusion, being misunderstood or misunderstanding, and a tendency to believe the version of events that feels best. The first two clauses name the defect his method was made of. Overlapping dialogue is speech deliberately made hard to follow, and a director whose signature is that the audience cannot quite catch what is being said has taken the reading's complaint and used it as equipment.

Jupiter sits sixty degrees from Saturn at just over a quarter of a degree inside the rectangle, growth that holds, read as sound judgement about risk and as a career that accumulates rather than spikes. That second clause is wrong about him, and the record shows why without meaning to. MASH and The Player sit in the same sentence and there are twenty two years between them, a stretch the industry largely spent not employing him. A career that spikes, subsides and spikes again is the shape this reading rules out.

His Moon sits thirteen arcminutes short of leaving Capricorn at noon, with Aquarius the alternative, which is about as marginal as a placement gets, so it is left out and two of the death sky's contacts go with it. Mercury sits in quiet contact with Uranus at just over a degree, a mind that finds unexpected connections and is not troubled by unconventional conclusions, which is the better of the two Mercury readings here for a man who let a cast improvise. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. He died in Los Angeles on 20 November 2006, at eighty one. Mercury stood in direct opposition to his natal Mars at a tenth of a degree that day and Uranus in easy contact with his natal Pluto at four fifths. The Moon was balsamic and nought per cent lit.