Antonio Banderas

When Antonio Banderas was cast in The Mambo Kings in 1992, his first English-language film, he barely spoke English. He learned many of his lines phonetically, memorizing the sounds without fully understanding the words. Within a few years he was one of the biggest Spanish-speaking stars in Hollywood, playing a gunslinging mariachi in Desperado, Zorro in The Mask of Zorro and the voice of Puss in Boots in the Shrek films.

He was born at 9:00 p.m. on August 10, 1960, in Málaga, Spain, according to his birth record. His Sun is in Leo, the sign of the performer, warm, theatrical and generous. It falls in the sixth house of daily work and craft, with Venus and Pluto in Virgo beside it. A Leo Sun in the sixth describes a performer whose sense of self comes through steady, hard work rather than effortless stardom, and Banderas has worked relentlessly across theater, film and voice acting for more than four decades.

His Moon is in Aries in the first house. Aries is passionate, impulsive and fiery, and a first-house Moon puts those emotions right on the surface. It fits the screen persona that made him famous: the intense, romantic, hot-blooded leading man.

He wanted to be a professional footballer as a boy in Málaga, until he broke his foot at fourteen. He turned to theater instead, moved to Madrid, and was discovered by the director Pedro Almodóvar, who cast him in a series of films in the 1980s, including Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! The collaboration made him a star in Spain.

His rising sign is Pisces, often called the chameleon of the zodiac, able to become whoever a role requires. Banderas has played heroes, villains, lovers and a swashbuckling cartoon cat, in Spanish, English and Italian.

Jupiter in Sagittarius occupies his tenth house, the part of a chart tied to reputation. Jupiter expands, and Sagittarius reaches across borders; in the tenth, the placement points to an international career, and Banderas became one of the few European actors of his generation to sustain a long Hollywood career.

In 2017 he had a heart attack, and he has said it changed his priorities. Two years later he played a version of Almodóvar himself, an aging director reflecting on his life, in Pain and Glory, which won him the best actor prize at Cannes and his first Academy Award nomination. That same year he opened the Teatro del Soho in his hometown of Málaga, a theater he founded and funds. The Leo in the house of work had come home to the stage.