Marlon Brando

In March 1973, Marlon Brando was named Best Actor at the Oscars for The Godfather and refused the award. In his place he sent the actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who told the audience he could not accept because of the film industry's treatment of Native Americans. She was booed by part of the crowd. Brando, typically, was not there to see it.

Defiance was his natural state, and his chart is full of fire. He was born at 11:00 p.m. on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, a time from his birth certificate, and the Sun and Moon were both in Aries, almost on top of each other, a new moon in the sign of the rebel. Aries is impulsive, combative and independent, and with both lights there, astrologers would expect someone whose identity and emotional life alike are built around doing things his own way. The conjunction falls in the fourth house, the area of home and family, and Brando's own home life was difficult; both of his parents drank heavily, and he spent much of his life grappling with that childhood.

He was expelled from a military academy as a teenager, moved to New York and studied acting with Stella Adler. In 1947 he played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, and the 1951 film version made him a sensation. His naturalistic, emotionally raw style changed screen acting. On the Waterfront brought him his first Oscar in 1955, and his "I coulda been a contender" scene remains one of the most imitated in film history.

Sagittarius is on his Ascendant, with Jupiter in Sagittarius in the first house. Sagittarius is expansive, freedom-loving and larger than life, and Jupiter magnifies it. As a public presence, the combination suggests someone who could not be contained, physically or otherwise, and Brando's appetite, charisma and unpredictability became legendary.

His career went through long slumps and spectacular comebacks. The Godfather revived it in 1972, followed by Last Tango in Paris and, later, Apocalypse Now. Directors found him brilliant and impossible in roughly equal measure.

Saturn, retrograde at the very start of Scorpio, sits in the eleventh house of causes and groups. Saturn takes commitments seriously, and in the eleventh it often attaches them to a cause. Brando supported the civil rights movement in the 1960s and Native American rights for decades, and the Oscar refusal was only the most public moment.

He spent much of his later life on Tetiaroa, an atoll in French Polynesia that he bought in the 1960s after filming Mutiny on the Bounty in Tahiti. He died in 2004. The two Aries lights had always pointed the same direction: away from anyone trying to tell him what to do.