Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks lived in about ten different houses before he turned ten. His parents divorced when he was small, and he went with his father, a cook who kept moving for work, until the family finally settled in Oakland. It's an unsettled start for someone who would become, for several generations of moviegoers, the actor who feels most like home.

That tension sits right at the top of his chart. Hanks was born at 11:17 a.m. on July 9, 1956, in Concord, California (a time taken from his birth certificate), which puts his Cancer Sun high in the tenth house, the part of the chart astrologers tie to career and public standing. Cancer is the sign of home, family and belonging. Placed in the house of reputation, it points to a working life built around supplying the steadiness he went without. You don't need astrology to see how often his best roles turn on getting someone home: a man stranded on an island in Cast Away, a commander nursing a crippled spacecraft back to Earth in Apollo 13, a captain sent across France to bring one soldier back in Saving Private Ryan.

He got there slowly. After Skyline High School he studied drama at Chabot College and then Sacramento State, where a part in The Cherry Orchard led to a summer with the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Ohio in 1977. Television came next, on the sitcom Bosom Buddies, then the mermaid comedy Splash in 1984 and Big in 1988, which brought his first Oscar nomination. What followed surprised almost everyone: Best Actor for Philadelphia and again for Forrest Gump, making him the first actor since Spencer Tracy to win the category two years running.

His Leo Moon in the eleventh house may be why the warmth never reads as a performance. A Leo Moon wants to be seen and wants people glad they came; the eleventh house governs friendships, groups and audiences. Hanks has gone back to the same directors for decades, from Steven Spielberg to Robert Zemeckis to Ron Howard, who also directed Splash. Venus in Gemini, retrograde and also in the tenth, adds a talkative, curious charm, the kind that courts ideas as readily as people. He married Rita Wilson in 1988, and the two have been one of Hollywood's steadiest couples since.

Virgo rises in his chart, and Jupiter has barely crossed into Virgo, at 0°, in the twelfth house, the private, behind-closed-doors end of the wheel. Virgo is the sign of craft, repair and upkeep, and the twelfth house is where work happens out of view. His best-known private passion fits almost too neatly: he collects and restores manual typewriters, sends them to fans and repair shops, and in 2017 published Uncommon Type, a short-story collection with a typewriter in every story. His first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, followed in 2023.

Astrology can't account for a forty-year career, and a chart is no guarantee of character. Still, the shape of this one and the shape of the life line up unusually well: a Cancer who grew up without a fixed address, became the most dependable presence in American movies, and spends his spare hours bringing old machines back into working order. In 2016 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.