Meg Ryan

The most famous line in When Harry Met Sally wasn't Meg Ryan's. After Ryan's character fakes an orgasm at Katz's Delicatessen, a woman at the next table tells the waiter, "I'll have what she's having." The woman was Estelle Reiner, the director's mother, and the line was Billy Crystal's idea. But the scene belonged to Ryan, who was willing to play it loud, long and absolutely straight, and it made her the defining romantic-comedy star of her era.

She was born Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra on November 19, 1961, in Fairfield, Connecticut, at 10:36 in the morning, a time Astro-Databank rates A. Her Sun is in Scorpio, in the tenth house of public life and reputation, with Mercury and Neptune also in Scorpio there. Scorpio is intense, private and drawn to darkness and depth. It is not the sign anyone would guess for America's sweetheart, and yet it may explain why Ryan spent so much of her career trying to get past that image.

Neptune in the tenth house is associated with glamour and with being seen through a dreamy, idealized filter. For more than a decade audiences saw Ryan almost entirely through the lens of the bright, flustered heroine of Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, both written by Nora Ephron and co-starring Tom Hanks. The Scorpio underneath kept pushing for darker roles: a helicopter pilot whose Medal of Honor nomination is under investigation in Courage Under Fire, and a sexually frank thriller, Jane Campion's In the Cut, in 2003.

Capricorn is her rising sign, with Saturn in Capricorn and Jupiter in Aquarius in the first house. Saturn there gives a reserved, self-controlled core beneath the public warmth, and Ryan has described herself as shy and private. Her childhood was difficult; her mother left the family when Ryan was fifteen.

She studied journalism at the University of Connecticut and New York University, and took a role on the soap opera As the World Turns to pay for school. Small film roles followed, including the wife of Anthony Edwards's character in Top Gun, before When Harry Met Sally in 1989.

Her Moon is in Aries, a sign of independence and impulsive feeling, placed in the third house of everyday communication and siblings. Aries Moons need room to act on their own, and in interviews Ryan has been blunt about walking away from Hollywood when it stopped feeling right.

Mars in Sagittarius also sits in the tenth house, giving restless energy to her career choices. She married the actor Dennis Quaid in 1991; their son, Jack Quaid, is now an actor too. They divorced in 2001, and in 2006 she adopted a daughter, Daisy, from China.

She stepped back from acting for years, then returned as a director. Her second film behind the camera, What Happens Later, in 2023, reunited her with the romantic comedy, this time on her own terms. The Scorpio Sun at the top of her chart always wanted to control the story, and eventually it did.