Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, more than any other performer, and never once went to the ceremony to collect one. She considered the awards beside the point. She also spent years giving the press the wrong birthday, November 8, which had been the birthday of her older brother, Tom, who died suddenly in 1921 when she was thirteen. Only in her 1991 memoir, Me, did she set the record straight.

The real date was May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut, and her birth certificate puts the time at 5:47 in the evening. Three planets gather in Taurus there: the Sun, the Moon and Mercury. Taurus is stubborn, practical and unshakable, a sign that knows its own mind and does not move for anyone. Hepburn wore trousers when actresses were expected to wear dresses, refused to sign autographs, swam in cold water year-round and told interviewers exactly what she thought.

All three Taurus planets fall in her seventh house, which governs partnership, marriage and the significant other. For Hepburn, the defining partnership of her life was with Spencer Tracy. They made nine films together, beginning with Woman of the Year in 1942, and remained companions for twenty-six years, until his death in 1967, though Tracy, a Catholic, never divorced his wife. The screen partnership was built on sparring equals, and audiences loved watching two strong personalities meet head-on.

Her parents were unconventional for their time. Her father was a urologist who campaigned to educate the public about venereal disease, and her mother was a suffragist who worked alongside Margaret Sanger for access to birth control. The children were raised to speak up, exercise hard and debate at the dinner table.

Scorpio is her rising sign, which gives an intense, guarded and formidable presence. Hepburn was intensely private and famously difficult to interview, and her magnetism on screen had a sharp edge.

Her early career moved fast. She won her first Oscar for Morning Glory in 1933, only her third film. Then came a run of flops, and in 1938 a group of theater owners took out a trade advertisement labeling her "box office poison." Hepburn responded with a Taurus-like refusal to give up. She acquired the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which had been written for her on Broadway, and sold them to MGM on the condition that she would star. The 1940 film was a hit, and the comeback was complete.

Mars in Capricorn sits in her third house of everyday communication, a placement of disciplined, combative speech. Her clipped Connecticut accent and rapid-fire delivery became her trademark.

The later Oscars came for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter and On Golden Pond, the last at seventy-four, nearly half a century after the first. She died on June 29, 2003, at ninety-six. The Taurus planets never budged, and that steadiness was the point.