Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg's first audience was a Boy Scout troop. As a boy in Arizona he made a short western on his father's 8mm camera to earn a photography merit badge, and he has said the reaction of the other scouts, laughing and cheering in the right places, told him what he wanted to do with his life. By his teens he was making war films and science fiction with friends and charging admission at a local theater.

He was born at 6:16 p.m. on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, according to his birth certificate. The most striking feature of his chart is a cluster of three planets, the Moon, Venus and Jupiter, all in Scorpio and all in the fifth house. The fifth governs creativity, play, entertainment and children; Scorpio brings intensity, fear and fascination with what lies beneath the surface. Astrologers would read this as a creative life driven by deep, sometimes dark emotional material and expressed through spectacle. It is hard to think of a filmmaker who has done more with fear, from the shark in Jaws to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.

His Sun is in Sagittarius in the sixth house, joined by Mercury in Sagittarius and Mars at the very start of Capricorn. Sagittarius is expansive and optimistic, the sign of big journeys and bigger ideas, and the sixth house governs daily work. It describes a man who is happiest working, and the filmography backs that up: more than three dozen features as director, plus well over a hundred productions as a producer.

Jaws in 1975 invented the summer blockbuster. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. followed in quick succession, and by the early 1980s he was the most commercially successful director in the world. Recognition from the Academy came later. Schindler's List won him Best Director and Best Picture in 1994, and he won Best Director again for Saving Private Ryan.

His rising sign is Cancer, which astrologers most associate with family, childhood and home. Many of his films return to broken or longing families: the absent father in E.T., the separated families of Close Encounters, the boy searching for his mother in A.I. His parents' divorce, which he has described as one of the defining events of his youth, became the subject of The Fabelmans in 2022, his most openly autobiographical film.

His second house, which concerns resources and what a person builds to last, holds Saturn and Pluto in Leo. In 1994 he co-founded the studio DreamWorks, and the same year he established what became the USC Shoah Foundation, which recorded video testimony from tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors and witnesses so their accounts would outlive them.

Late in life he revealed that he had been diagnosed with dyslexia at around sixty, which he said explained a great deal about how hard school had been. The boy who struggled with reading had told stories with pictures instead, and kept doing so for more than fifty years.