Walt Disney

In 1928, Walt Disney lost the rights to his most successful character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, to his distributor, along with most of his animators. On the train home from New York, according to the story he liked to tell, he came up with a mouse. Mickey Mouse debuted later that year in Steamboat Willie, one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, and Disney never again let someone else own what he created.

He was born on December 5, 1901, in Chicago. His birth time is uncertain: the commonly used time is 12:35 a.m., but another source gives 7:30 in the morning, so the rising sign and houses are not reliable. The planets are clear, though, and the most striking feature of his chart is a cluster of four planets in Capricorn: Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Capricorn is the sign of the builder, ambitious, strategic and patient, the sign that turns a vision into an institution. With four planets there, including both Jupiter's expansion and Saturn's structure, astrologers would expect someone who builds an empire, and Disney turned a struggling cartoon studio into one of the largest entertainment companies in the world.

His Sun is in Sagittarius, the sign of imagination, optimism and big dreams. The combination of a Sagittarius Sun with a Capricorn cluster describes a visionary who could also run the business, and Disney was both: the man who dreamed up Disneyland and the man who mortgaged his own life insurance to help pay for it.

He grew up partly on a farm in Marceline, Missouri, which he later said inspired the Main Street of his theme parks, then in Kansas City, where he delivered newspapers for his father. At sixteen he joined the Red Cross and drove ambulances in France after the First World War. His first studio, Laugh-O-Gram, went bankrupt in 1923, and he moved to Los Angeles with almost nothing.

The Capricorn ambition kept growing. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which Hollywood called "Disney's Folly" while he was making it, opened in 1937 as the first full-length cel-animated feature in America and became a huge hit. Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi followed. He won 22 competitive Academy Awards, more than any other individual in history.

His Moon is in Libra, a sign of charm, harmony and an eye for beauty, which suits the warm, avuncular public figure he became as the host of his own television programs in the 1950s.

Disneyland opened in Anaheim in 1955. He died in December 1966, before Walt Disney World opened in Florida in 1971. The Sagittarius Sun dreamed the parks; the four planets in Capricorn built them.