Yul Brynner

Not one of his ten planets sits in an air sign. Water takes five, fire three and earth two, with five of the ten fixed. Six of the ten sit in two adjacent signs: Mercury, Jupiter and Neptune inside ten degrees of Leo, and the Sun, Venus and Pluto across thirteen degrees of Cancer. His Moon's sign is certain at thirteen degrees of Taurus. The record says Brynner played the King of Siam four thousand six hundred and twenty five times on stage and once on film, shaved his head for it in 1951 and kept it that way, and recorded an anti-smoking message to be broadcast after his death.

Two separate contacts in this chart run to Uranus and both of them say he could not stay anywhere. Venus lies at an awkward angle to Uranus at a fifth of a degree, the tightest contact he has, read as abrupt endings and as sabotaging something stable because it has become predictable. The Sun sits at the same angle to Uranus at under two degrees, read as restlessness and as a pattern of leaving things just before they mature. The record is one part played four thousand six hundred and twenty five times and a haircut kept for thirty four years.

That is the clearest inverse in this batch and it is worth being exact about why it counts. Two contacts to the same planet, each written without reference to any person and without reference to each other, agree on restlessness, and the record answers both with the most repeated performance in the history of the stage. A reader who wanted the chart to account for the career would have to argue that doing one thing four thousand times is a form of not settling.

Saturn sits sixty degrees from Pluto at under two thirds of a degree, durable strength, read as rebuilding after loss and as authority that has genuinely been earned, which in a man whose part was a king is a coincidence of vocabulary worth naming and not worth leaning on. Mercury sits conjunct Neptune at a third of a degree, imaginative thought. Uranus was the only retrograde planet. He died in New York on 10 October 1985, at sixty five, having arranged for a message against smoking to be broadcast once he was gone. Mercury stood conjunct his natal Mars at a third of a degree that day. The transiting Sun stood square its own birth place at just over a degree, which is the calendar rather than an omen: he died three months after his birthday, and three months is a quarter of a circle. The Moon was at its last quarter and seventeen per cent lit.