Sean Connery

Before he was James Bond, Sean Connery delivered milk in Edinburgh. He grew up in Fountainbridge, a working-class district of the city, the son of a cleaner and a factory worker, and left school at thirteen. He served in the Royal Navy until a stomach ulcer ended that, then worked as a bricklayer, a lifeguard, a coffin polisher and an artist's model. A bodybuilding competition in London in 1953 led to a job in the chorus of South Pacific, and the chorus led to acting.

He was born at 6:05 p.m. on August 25, 1930, at the Royal Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh, a time quoted from the hospital's record. His Ascendant falls in Capricorn, associated with authority, reserve and self-made ambition. A Capricorn Ascendant tends to give a grave, controlled presence that seems older than its years, and Connery projected exactly that: the stillness, the economy of movement and the sense of a man who did not need to raise his voice.

His Sun is at the very start of Virgo, in the seventh house of partners and opponents. Virgo is precise, practical and unsentimental, and in the seventh it describes someone defined through others, in Connery's case the long line of adversaries and leading ladies across seven Bond films, starting with Dr. No in 1962. He made the character cool and dangerous at once, and every later Bond has been measured against him.

The Moon and Mercury, both in Virgo, sit in the eighth house, the zone of power, risk and transformation. Virgo Moons are self-critical and private, and in the eighth they keep their depths hidden. Connery was famously guarded about his inner life and grew tired of Bond quickly, partly, he said, because the role was swallowing him.

He spent the following decades proving he was more than the role. He worked with John Huston on The Man Who Would Be King, played a monk-detective in The Name of the Rose, and took the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as the Chicago beat cop Jim Malone in The Untouchables. He was Indiana Jones's father in The Last Crusade and a submarine commander in The Hunt for Red October.

Jupiter and Pluto both sit in Cancer in the seventh house as well, adding emotional weight to his partnerships and to his loyalties. The deepest of those was to Scotland. He had "Scotland Forever" tattooed on his arm as a young sailor and spent decades supporting Scottish independence, even while living abroad.

Saturn, retrograde in its own sign of Capricorn, falls in the twelfth house, a placement associated with solitude and quiet endurance. Connery retired from acting after 2003 and spent his last years mostly out of public view in the Bahamas, where he died in 2020, at 90. He had been knighted in 2000. The milkman from Fountainbridge had kept his accent, his reserve and his country all the way through.