Marilyn Monroe

Before she was Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jeane Mortenson spent much of her childhood in foster homes and two years in an orphanage. Her mother, Gladys, struggled with severe mental illness, and her father was absent. At sixteen she married a neighbor to avoid returning to the orphanage. During the war she was working on an assembly line at a munitions plant when an army photographer took pictures of women contributing to the war effort, and the photos started her modeling career.

She was born at 9:30 a.m. on June 1, 1926, at Los Angeles General Hospital, a time recorded on her birth certificate. Her chart has Leo rising, the sign most associated with glamour, presence and a hunger for love and attention. It may be the most famous Leo Ascendant in astrology, and it fits the persona she built: luminous, theatrical and impossible to look away from.

Her Sun is in Gemini in the tenth house, alongside Mercury, also in Gemini. Gemini is quick, witty and curious, and the tenth governs career and public image. The combination describes a public life built on quickness, and the side of Monroe that the bombshell image obscured. She was a sharp comic actress with impeccable timing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, which won her a Golden Globe, and she was known for witty one-liners in interviews. She also read widely and studied at the Actors Studio in New York.

Her Moon is in Aquarius in the seventh house, with Jupiter also in Aquarius there. The seventh governs marriage and partnership, and Aquarius is independent and unconventional. An Aquarius Moon in the seventh tends to seek freedom within relationships and can find closeness hard to sustain. Monroe married three times: to James Dougherty at sixteen, to the baseball star Joe DiMaggio in 1954 for less than a year, and to the playwright Arthur Miller in 1956, a marriage that lasted about five years.

Saturn, retrograde in Scorpio, sits in the fourth house, the area of home, family and early foundations. Saturn there often describes a difficult or insecure childhood and a lasting search for a stable base, and it is hard to read Monroe's early years any other way.

She also fought the studio system that made her. In 1955, frustrated with typecasting and her contract at 20th Century Fox, she left Hollywood for New York and founded her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, making her one of the first women in Hollywood to do so. The studio eventually gave her a new contract with more control.

She died on August 4, 1962, at 36. The Leo rising became one of the most recognizable images of the twentieth century; the Gemini Sun in the tenth was the intelligence behind it.