Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw was a lion who ruled by the pen, and his chart makes the shape of the man plain. His Sun blazes in Leo, its own domicile, at full strength: the born king of the castle, charismatic, dramatic, impossible to ignore. Yet that solar fire lands in the third house of words, wit and self-effort, the mercurial arena of the communicator who shines by making and saying. He did exactly that, more than sixty plays including Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan, earning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and, remarkably, an Academy Award for the Pygmalion screenplay. His Gemini Ascendant sealed it, the quicksilver messenger who takes an idea from here and delivers it there, restless, cheeky, forever debating both sides.

His Moon is exalted in Taurus, the luminary at its most peaceful, earthy and devoted, craving a secure foundation; but it rests in the twelfth house, dissolved into the collective unconscious, the detached and unknowable realm that can make a person seem almost coolly removed from ordinary feeling. That distance shows in his contrarian streak: he denounced both sides in the Great War and, soberly noted, voiced admiration for dictators of right and left. He wrote almost to his death at ninety-four, refusing all state honours. A theatrical Sun, a devoted Moon, a mercurial mask.