Audrey Hepburn

As a teenager in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Audrey Hepburn nearly starved. During the Dutch famine of 1944 and 1945, the "Hunger Winter," she survived for a time on very little, and she later said that the food and medicine brought in by relief workers after liberation were the reason she was alive. Forty years later, as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, she traveled to Ethiopia, Somalia and other countries in crisis, and she always said she was paying back what had been given to her.

That compassion sits right on the surface of her chart. She was born on May 4, 1929, in Ixelles, Brussels, at three in the morning, a time quoted from her birth certificate, and her Moon is in Pisces in the first house. Pisces is the most compassionate sign, and a first-house Moon puts emotional life where everyone can see it. Astrologers would expect someone whose tenderness shows plainly, and audiences responded to exactly that quality in her work, the vulnerability under the elegance.

Aquarius is on her Ascendant, the sign of humanitarian ideals and a slightly unconventional, independent style. Hepburn did not look like the other stars of the 1950s; she was slender, gamine and modern, and her look, especially in partnership with the designer Hubert de Givenchy, changed fashion.

Her Sun is in Taurus in the second house, with Jupiter also in Taurus there. Taurus is the sign of beauty, grace and refined taste, and the second house concerns possessions and personal values. A Taurus Sun in the second describes someone with an instinct for elegance and a clear sense of what matters, and Hepburn's style has been imitated ever since.

She trained as a ballet dancer, but malnutrition during the war left her without the stamina for a career in ballet, and she turned to acting. Her first major film role, as a runaway princess in Roman Holiday, won her the Academy Award in 1954. Sabrina, Funny Face, Breakfast at Tiffany's and My Fair Lady followed, and the image of Holly Golightly in a black dress outside Tiffany's became one of the most famous in cinema.

Saturn, retrograde at the very start of Capricorn, sits in the tenth house of career and public role. Saturn in the tenth tends to describe a serious sense of responsibility attached to one's public life, and Hepburn treated her fame, late in life, as a tool. She largely stopped acting in the late 1960s to raise her sons, and from 1988 devoted herself to UNICEF, visiting famine and war zones and testifying before Congress.

She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992 and died the following January. The girl who survived the Hunger Winter became the woman who spent her last years making sure other children did too.