Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski was born in Paris on August 18, 1933, at 10:30 a.m., according to his birth record, to Polish parents who moved the family back to Kraków a few years later. When Germany occupied Poland, the family was forced into the Kraków Ghetto. His mother was murdered at Auschwitz. Polanski, still a child, escaped the ghetto and survived the rest of the war by hiding with Polish families in the countryside.

That childhood shaped films that return again and again to fear, confinement and menace. His chart places the Moon in Cancer in the tenth house, with Pluto, also in Cancer, beside it. The tenth governs career and public life; Cancer is the sign of home and mother; Pluto is the planet of loss, power and upheaval. Astrologers would read a Cancer Moon with Pluto in the tenth as a public life marked by profound personal loss, and violent tragedy has repeatedly intersected with his career.

After the war he studied at the film school in Łódź. His first feature, Knife in the Water, earned an Oscar nomination, and he moved on to Repulsion in England and then Hollywood, where Rosemary's Baby in 1968 made him one of the most sought-after directors in the world. In 1969 his wife, the actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, was murdered in their Los Angeles home by followers of Charles Manson. Five years later he made Chinatown, often ranked among the greatest American films.

In 1977 Polanski was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and, in 1978, before he could be sentenced, fled the United States for France. He has not returned. Other women have since made further allegations against him, which he denies. In 2018 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expelled him.

His Sun is in Leo in the eleventh house, the area of groups, networks and allies. Leo is proud and creative, and in the eleventh it describes someone sustained by a circle of supporters. For decades a significant part of the European film world continued to work with and defend him, while many others called for him to face the American courts.

Libra rises, with Mars in Libra in the first house. Libra is concerned with appearances and balance, and a first-house Mars adds force to the persona. Venus and Jupiter in Virgo fall in the twelfth, the house of what is hidden.

In 2002 he made The Pianist, about a Jewish musician surviving in Warsaw during the occupation, drawing on his own memories of the ghetto. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and he won the Academy Award for Best Director, which he could not collect in person because he would have faced arrest in the United States. The film and the case have shadowed each other ever since.