Whitney Houston

At Super Bowl XXV in January 1991, during the Gulf War, Whitney Houston sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" in a slow, soaring, gospel-inflected arrangement that brought much of the stadium to tears. Released as a single, it became a hit. It remains, for many people, the definitive performance of the national anthem, and it showed what made Houston extraordinary: a voice of immense power and control that could turn a familiar song into an event.

She was born on August 9, 1963, in Newark, New Jersey, at 8:55 in the evening, a time on her birth certificate. Her mother, Cissy Houston, was a gospel and session singer; her cousin was Dionne Warwick; and Aretha Franklin was a family friend she called Aunt Ree. She first sang solos in the choir of New Hope Baptist Church in Newark.

Her Sun is in Leo, with Venus also in Leo, both in the sixth house, the area of daily work, craft and health. Leo is the sign of star power and grand performance, and in the sixth it describes a performer whose gift is honed through relentless daily work. Houston's vocal technique, her control of range, phrasing and dynamics, was the product of years of training under her mother.

Her Moon is in Aries in the first house, with Jupiter in Aries beside it. An Aries Moon is passionate and intense, and Jupiter magnifies it. In the first house, those emotions show up immediately in a person's presence, and Houston's performances seemed to pour out raw feeling.

Pisces is her rising sign, a sign of spirituality, devotion and escape. Pisces is associated with gospel music and with transcendence, but also with vulnerability to addiction. Houston struggled for many years with drugs, and her decline played out in public.

She was signed by Clive Davis to Arista Records in 1983. Her 1985 debut album made her a star, and she went on to record seven consecutive No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, a record. In 1992 she starred in The Bodyguard, and her version of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" became one of the best-selling singles of all time, while the soundtrack became one of the best-selling albums ever.

Mercury in Virgo, Mars in Libra and Pluto in Virgo all fall in her seventh house of marriage. Pluto in the seventh describes intense, transformative and sometimes destructive partnerships. She married the singer Bobby Brown in 1992; their stormy marriage, marked by substance abuse, ended in divorce in 2007. Their daughter, Bobbi Kristina, was born in 1993.

Saturn, retrograde in Aquarius, sits in her twelfth house of hidden struggles, and Neptune in Scorpio lies in her eighth house of loss. On February 11, 2012, the night before the Grammy Awards, Houston was found dead in a hotel bathtub in Beverly Hills; heart disease and cocaine use were contributing factors. She was forty-eight. The Leo planets gave her one of the greatest voices of the century; the Pisces Ascendant carried both its devotion and its fragility.

For anyone in the United States struggling with drug or alcohol use, the SAMHSA National Helpline can be reached around the clock at 1-800-662-4357.