Tony Scott

Not one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign. Air takes five, fire three and water two, with four of the ten mutable, and nothing in this chart was retrograde. The Sun, Mercury, Venus and Uranus spread across twenty degrees of Gemini, and Mars, Jupiter and Pluto across sixteen of Leo. The record is one line: Scott was an English director of Top Gun and True Romance.

The Sun sits eight arcminutes from the end of Gemini and Saturn eight arcminutes into Cancer, so those two make a conjunction across a sign boundary with both planets inside a sixth of a degree of it. The orb between them is a quarter of a degree, and the reading is self-definition through discipline: seriousness from a young age, achievement that is genuinely earned, and a person who finds it very hard to believe they have done enough. In a director the record identifies by two films, that arrangement is worth describing before the reading attached to it.

In a director the record identifies by two films, that last clause is the one with something in it, and it is also unfalsifiable from outside, which is worth admitting rather than hiding. The first two are easier: a working life in a trade where a film either gets finished or does not is a reasonable home for a reading about earned achievement. Mercury sits sixty degrees from Mars at under half a degree, mental energy that goes somewhere, which the reading sums up as finishing what gets started, and in a trade run to a schedule that is the more practical contact of the two.

The Moon sits in mild friction with Jupiter at under a fifth of a degree, the closest contact here, emotional overreach: promising more than can be delivered, and faith that outruns the evidence. Its sign is certain at eight degrees of Cancer, where feeling is at full strength and entirely unfiltered. Mars sits in mild friction with Neptune at just over a degree, will without direction. He died at San Pedro on 19 August 2012, at sixty eight. Uranus stood in hard contact with his natal Moon at a third of a degree that day, and nothing else came inside half a degree. The Moon was new and six per cent lit.