Lucille Ball

On January 19, 1953, about 44 million Americans watched Lucy Ricardo give birth on I Love Lucy, more than would watch Dwight Eisenhower's inauguration the following day. The real Lucille Ball had given birth to her son, Desi Arnaz Jr., by cesarean section that same morning. Ball had insisted on writing her pregnancy into the show at a time when network censors would not even allow the word "pregnant" on the air.

She was born on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York, at five in the afternoon, according to her birth record. Her Sun is in Leo, the sign of the performer, which needs to be seen and loves to make people happy, and it falls in her eighth house with Mercury in Virgo. The eighth deals with shared money, other people's resources and transformation, and fittingly, Ball became one of the most powerful businesswomen in Hollywood.

Capricorn is her rising sign, and the Moon is there too, in the first house. Capricorn is the sign of the executive: practical, ambitious and serious about money and structure. A Capricorn Moon on the Ascendant describes someone whose emotional security depends on control and hard work, and behind the wild physical comedy, Ball was famously disciplined, rehearsing every pratfall with precision.

Her early life was hard. Her father died of typhoid fever when she was three, and she was partly raised by her grandparents. As a teenager she went to drama school in New York, where she was told she had no future as an actress. She worked as a model, moved to Hollywood in 1933, and spent years in so many small films at RKO that she was nicknamed the Queen of the B's.

Jupiter in Scorpio sits at the top of her chart, in the tenth house, where public standing is read. Jupiter here is associated with great success in public life, often reached late, and Ball's arrived when she was forty. In 1951, CBS wanted to adapt her radio show, My Favorite Husband, for television, but resisted casting her Cuban-born husband, Desi Arnaz, as her husband on screen. Ball and Arnaz formed their own company, Desilu, to make I Love Lucy themselves, and filmed it in front of a live audience using three cameras, a method that set the standard for television sitcoms and made reruns possible.

Mars and Saturn share Taurus and her fourth house, which concerns domestic life, a pairing that suggests a home under heavy pressure. Ball and Arnaz had a turbulent marriage, and they divorced in 1960. Two years later she bought out his share of Desilu and became the first woman to run a major television studio. Under her leadership Desilu backed two shows other executives doubted: Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.

Venus in Virgo, in the ninth house, gave her a perfectionist's eye for craft. She later starred in The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy. She died on April 26, 1989. The Leo Sun made the country laugh; the Capricorn Moon on the Ascendant ran the studio that filmed it.