Mark Ruffalo

In 2000, after nearly a decade of bartending and small parts, Mark Ruffalo finally had his breakthrough. Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me made critics take notice, and offers began arriving. Then, in 2001, he was diagnosed with a vestibular schwannoma, a benign brain tumor. Surgery to remove it left him with temporary facial paralysis and deaf in one ear, and for a time he was not sure he could keep acting at all.

He did, and the chart suggests why the setback did not end him. Ruffalo was born at 7:33 a.m. on November 22, 1967, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, according to his birth certificate. His Sun is at the final degree of Scorpio, in the twelfth house. Scorpio is the sign of crisis, endurance and transformation, the sign most associated with dying and coming back changed. The twelfth is the hidden house, linked with hospitals, private struggle and recovery out of sight. A Scorpio Sun in the twelfth describes someone whose deepest transformations happen away from the public eye.

He moved to California as a teenager, studied at the Stella Adler Conservatory and co-founded a small theater company in Los Angeles, writing, directing and acting while tending bar to pay the rent. The years after his recovery were full of good work: Zodiac, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Kids Are All Right, Foxcatcher and Spotlight, with Academy Award nominations for the last three and later for Poor Things. In 2012 he became Bruce Banner, the Hulk, in The Avengers, which made him globally famous.

Sagittarius rises in his chart, the sign of ideals, principles and big causes. It suits the side of Ruffalo that is as well known as the acting: his activism. He has campaigned against fracking, co-founded the environmental group Water Defense in 2011 and spoken out regularly on politics and climate.

His Moon is at the final degree of Cancer in the eighth house, which astrologers connect with deep emotional bonds, loss and shared crisis. Cancer Moons feel things intensely and protect the people close to them, and in the eighth they often know grief early. Ruffalo has spoken about family tragedy and about how loss shaped his sense of what matters.

Venus in Libra in the tenth house gives him a warm, likable public face. Audiences tend to see him as decent and approachable, a quality that has made him believable as the gentle scientist inside the monster and as the dogged reporter in Spotlight.

In 2020 he won an Emmy for playing identical twins in I Know This Much Is True. The actor who nearly lost his career at its beginning had, by then, been working for twenty years on the far side of that operation.