Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry collection sold at auction in 2011 for more than $115 million, a record for a private collection. The pieces had stories attached: the Krupp diamond, La Peregrina, a pearl once owned by Mary Tudor, many of them gifts from Richard Burton, the man she married twice. Taylor loved beautiful things openly and without apology, and she turned that love into a business as well, launching the perfume White Diamonds in 1991, which became one of the best-selling celebrity fragrances ever made.

Possessions and value are written large in her chart. She was born at 2:30 a.m. on February 27, 1932, in Hampstead, London, from a birth certificate, and four bodies fall in her second house, the part of the chart tied to money, belongings and what a person treasures: the Sun, Mercury and Mars in Pisces, and Saturn at the very start of Aquarius. Pisces is romantic, sensual and drawn to beauty; the second house makes it tangible. Astrologers would be hard pressed to find a more fitting signature for the most famous jewel collector in Hollywood.

She was born in England to American parents, an art dealer and a former stage actress, and the family moved to Los Angeles as the Second World War began. At twelve she starred in National Velvet and became one of MGM's biggest child stars, then made the rare transition into adult stardom with A Place in the Sun, Giant and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She won the Academy Award for Butterfield 8 and again for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which she and Burton tore into each other as a bitter married couple.

Pluto, retrograde in Cancer, sits in her seventh house of marriage. Pluto there tends to describe partnerships of overwhelming intensity, with themes of possession, crisis and transformation. Taylor married eight times, to seven husbands, and her two marriages to Burton, who met her on the set of Cleopatra, were among the most publicized romances of the century.

Sagittarius is on her Ascendant, giving a frank, generous, larger-than-life manner. She was known for bawdy humor and for refusing to be ashamed of anything, including her many marriages.

Her Moon is in Scorpio in the eleventh house, the area of friends, groups and causes. A Scorpio Moon is loyal to the death and unafraid of taboo subjects, and in the eleventh it puts that loyalty to work for a cause. When her friend Rock Hudson was dying of AIDS in the mid-1980s and the disease was still widely shunned, Taylor became one of its first major celebrity advocates. She co-founded amfAR in 1985 and later the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, and she spent her final decades raising money and pressuring politicians when few stars would.

She died in 2011. The jewels went to auction, and a large share of the proceeds went to her AIDS foundation. The second house and the eleventh had worked together to the end.