Lana Del Rey

In 2011, a homemade video for a song called "Video Games" spread across the internet. A singer with a vintage look and a low, languid voice sang about devotion to a man who barely noticed her, over images of old Hollywood, skateboarders and grainy home movies. The singer called herself Lana Del Rey, and within months she was one of the most talked-about new artists in the world.

She was born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant on June 21, 1985, in New York City, and grew up in Lake Placid, in the Adirondack Mountains. Her birth time is not on record, so her Ascendant is unknown, but her planets are striking. Her Sun had only just entered Cancer, with Mercury and Mars also in Cancer. Cancer is the sign of memory, nostalgia, longing and home, and three Cancer placements describe someone drawn to the past and to emotional atmospheres. Del Rey's entire aesthetic is built on nostalgia: for a dreamlike, half-imagined America of motels, highways, old movie stars and lost love.

Her Moon falls in Leo, which is drawn to glamour, drama and the stage. A Leo Moon needs to be seen and expresses feeling theatrically, and Del Rey's songs are like scenes from films, starring a heroine who is both glamorous and doomed.

Venus in Taurus is sensual, luxurious and devoted to beauty. Venus is strong in Taurus, its own sign, and her music is lush and unhurried, full of strings and slow tempos. Saturn in Scorpio, retrograde, adds a dark, serious undercurrent, and her songs often deal with dangerous men, sadness and death.

As a teenager she was sent to boarding school in Connecticut partly because of her drinking, and she has said she has been sober since her late teens. She studied philosophy, with a focus on metaphysics, at Fordham University in New York, and released early music under the name Lizzy Grant before reinventing herself.

Her 2012 album, Born to Die, was a huge commercial success despite harsh criticism, including of her early live performances. Critics gradually came around, and her 2019 album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, was widely acclaimed as one of the best records of the decade.

Jupiter, retrograde in Aquarius, suggests growth through unconventional paths, and Uranus and Neptune describe a generation drawn to fantasy and reinvention. Del Rey has published poetry, including the collection Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass, and has continued to evolve her sound on albums such as Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.

Pluto, retrograde in Scorpio, adds intensity and an attraction to transformation. In 2024 she married Jeremy Dufrene, an alligator tour guide from Louisiana. The Cancer planets gave her the nostalgia; the Leo Moon turned it into cinema.