Javier Bardem

Javier Bardem was born into the trade. His mother, Pilar Bardem, was a working actress for decades; his uncle Juan Antonio Bardem was one of the most important Spanish film directors of the twentieth century, and his siblings act too. When Javier stepped in front of a camera, he was continuing a family conversation that had been going on for two generations.

The chart puts that inheritance in a prominent place. He was born at 9:30 p.m. on March 1, 1969, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, a time quoted from his birth certificate, and his Moon is in Leo in the tenth house. The tenth is the house astrologers tie to career, reputation and the parent who shaped one's public life; Leo is the sign of performance and creative pride. A Leo Moon in the tenth describes someone whose emotional security is bound up with the stage, and with the family's standing on it. It is about as literal a picture of an acting dynasty as a chart can draw.

His Sun is in Pisces in the fifth house, traditionally tied to creativity, play and self-expression. Pisces is the shape-shifter of the zodiac, sensitive and able to disappear into other lives, and in the fifth it points straight at performance. Bardem's career has been a series of transformations: the swaggering young men of Bigas Luna's Jamón Jamón, the exiled Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls, which made him the first Spanish actor nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor, and the quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro in The Sea Inside.

Then came Anton Chigurh. In the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, with a strange haircut and a captive bolt pistol, he played one of the most frightening villains in modern cinema, and he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2008, the first Spanish actor to win an Oscar. A Pisces can play almost anyone, astrologers would say, including the person nobody wants to meet.

The rising sign is Libra, all grace, diplomacy and charm, which fits the courteous, soft-spoken man who turns up in interviews, so different from many of his roles. Venus and Saturn sit together in Aries in the seventh house, the area astrologers read for marriage and partnership. Saturn there tends to describe a serious, lasting commitment, often formed after a long acquaintance. He and Penélope Cruz first worked together on Jamón Jamón in 1992 and married in 2010, and they have kept their family life notably private.

Later work kept moving him between Spanish and English-language film, from Biutiful, which earned him another Best Actor nomination, to the Dune films, in which he plays the Fremen leader Stilgar. The family trade, it turns out, travels well.