Roger Ebert

Air takes four of his ten planets, fire three, earth two and a single one water, with five of the ten mutable and only one cardinal. The Sun, Mercury, Saturn and Uranus spread across twenty five degrees of Gemini, and the Moon, Mars and Pluto across seventeen of Leo. The record calls Ebert the first film critic to win a Pulitzer, and a writer to the very end.

Four planets in Gemini, the sign built around knowing things and passing them on, in a man whose working life was explaining films to people who had not seen them, is the placement to start from. Mercury is one of the four, and it was the only retrograde planet in the chart, which puts the planet of saying things backwards, in its own sign, in a critic. That is a tidy arrangement rather than a finding: Mercury is retrograde in the sky about a fifth of the time.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Mars at under half a degree, thought and drive colliding: arguing for its own sake, impatience with slower thinkers, and saying the true thing in the most damaging available way. For a film critic that last phrase is the whole hazard of the job, and it is the one contact in this chart that reads like a description of a working method rather than of a temperament. The Sun sits in hard contact with Neptune at under a third of a degree, which is the self obscured, and Jupiter sits in quiet contact with Uranus at a tenth of a degree, fortunate change, which is the closest contact here and also the vaguest thing in it.

Mars sits sixty degrees from Uranus at over four fifths of a degree, quick reflexes and an instinct for the unconventional move, and in quiet contact with Jupiter at nine tenths, effort that pays and well timed action. The Moon sits in hard contact with Venus at three quarters of a degree, what soothes and what attracts disagreeing, and its sign is certain at twenty degrees of Leo. Mercury alone was retrograde. He died at Chicago on 4 April 2013, at seventy. Mars stood sixty degrees from his natal Mercury at just over a fifth of a degree that day, which is the planet of drive reaching the planet of writing, and for a record whose last five words are a writer to the very end that is the line to end on. The Moon was at its last quarter and thirty three per cent lit.