Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman was fifty before most moviegoers knew his name. He had spent years on stage, served four years in the Air Force as a radar technician, and spent much of the 1970s playing Easy Reader on the children's show The Electric Company. Then came Street Smart in 1987, Driving Miss Daisy and Glory in 1989, and a film career that arrived late and never slowed down.

The voice is what most people think of first, and his chart puts communication at the center. Freeman was born at 2:00 a.m. on June 1, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee, a time he gave himself on his National Geographic series The Story of God. Words and speech belong to Gemini, which holds his Sun, and Mercury, the planet that rules Gemini, sits in Taurus in the first house, a few degrees from Venus and Uranus. Taurus is traditionally linked with the throat, and a Taurus Mercury speaks slowly, evenly and without hurry. Astrologers would expect someone whose gift is to explain, narrate and connect, and few voices are more recognizable. He has narrated documentaries from March of the Penguins to his own series on science and faith.

He grew up between Mississippi, Chicago and Memphis, and fell in love with acting in school, but he joined the Air Force after high school and only later turned to the theater. Broadway and off-Broadway work in the 1960s and 1970s led to steady roles but not stardom. When it finally came, it came with weight: the dignified chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy, the sergeant in Glory, and Red, the narrator of The Shawshank Redemption, whose quiet voiceover is many people's favorite part of the film. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Million Dollar Baby.

Aries rises in his chart, which usually signals directness and a will of its own, but the planets gathered in Taurus behind it give that fire a calm, grounded surface. Jupiter in Capricorn, near the Midheaven in the tenth house, describes authority earned in public over a long time. Strangers tend to experience the result as gentle and wise, and filmmakers kept casting him as exactly that, the mentor, the president, the narrator who knows more than the characters, and, more than once, God himself.

Saturn sits in early Aries in the twelfth house, just behind the Ascendant. Saturn is the planet of time, patience and maturity, and in the twelfth, the hidden house, it often describes long years of work done out of view before recognition arrives. That is close to a summary of his career: the leading roles arrived in his fifties, and he has been working steadily ever since.

His Moon is at the final degree of Aquarius, placed among friendships and shared causes in the eleventh house. Aquarius is a cool, self-contained Moon that keeps its feelings at arm's length. Freeman has long been guarded about his personal life, preferring to talk about the work, or about the big questions of science and belief that his later documentaries explore.

The man who once taught children to read on public television ended up as the voice people trust to explain the universe. The Gemini Sun found its subject; Saturn just made it wait.