Ellen DeGeneres

When Ellen DeGeneres accepted the Carol Burnett Award at the Golden Globes in January 2020, she opened her speech with an unusually exact detail: she had been born in New Orleans on January 26, 1958, and the doctor delivered her at 8:43 in the morning. It was a joke about how long award speeches can run, but it gave astrologers a birth time straight from the source.

Her birth took place in Metairie, just outside New Orleans. Her Sun is in Aquarius, with Venus, retrograde, also in Aquarius, and both lie in the twelfth house, the most concealed sector of a chart, associated with secrets, privacy and what is kept behind closed doors. Aquarius is the sign of the individualist, a person who insists on being exactly who she is. In the twelfth, that individuality can stay hidden for years before it surfaces.

That is a fair outline of the most famous moment of her career. In April 1997 she appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the headline "Yep, I'm Gay," and later that month her sitcom character came out too, in "The Puppy Episode," watched by tens of millions of people. It was one of the most significant moments in the history of gay representation on American television, and it came at a heavy cost. The show was cancelled the following year, and her career stalled for several years.

Her Moon is in Aries in the first house, a placement of quick, raw feeling that tends to show up openly on the face. Pisces is her rising sign, gentle, absorbing and sensitive to atmosphere. Together they describe someone whose emotions are close to the surface, a quality that made her rambling, observational stand-up feel personal.

She grew up partly in New Orleans and partly in Texas, worked a string of jobs, including selling vacuum cleaners and shucking oysters, and began doing stand-up in the early 1980s. In 1986 she appeared on The Tonight Show, and Johnny Carson invited her to sit on the couch after her first set, a rare honor for a first-time comedian.

Mars and Saturn sit together in Sagittarius in the tenth house, where career and reputation are read. That combination describes a long, determined climb to prominence that also carries the risk of public setbacks. Her comeback began with the voice of Dory in Finding Nemo in 2003, and the same year she launched The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which ran for nineteen seasons and won dozens of Daytime Emmys. She hosted the Oscars twice, and in 2016 President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 2020, reports from former employees described a toxic workplace culture behind the show's friendly image, and DeGeneres apologized to her staff. The show ended in 2022. She married the actor Portia de Rossi in 2008, and in 2024 the couple moved to the English countryside. The Aquarius Sun had stepped out of the twelfth house once, and the world had watched.