Carla Bruni

Carla Bruni is the Italian-French artist who moved from the world's catwalks to the quiet craft of the song, and for four years to the residence of a president's wife. Born in Turin in 1967 into a family of concert pianists and composers, heiress to the CEAT tyre fortune, she came to France as a child and left school at nineteen to model, walking the great houses through the late 1980s and 1990s. Then she reinvented herself as a songwriter: her 2003 debut Quelqu'un m'a dit spent thirty-four weeks in the French top ten and won her Female Artist of the Year, followed by four further albums. In 2008 she married Nicolas Sarkozy and served as first lady of France until 2012.

Her Capricorn Sun is the old-soul climber, disciplined and patient, shining through the sixth house of work and daily craft; reinvention by steady labour is very much her signature. Her Virgo Moon in the third pours a meticulous, service-minded psyche into words, the exalted "happy Moon" that lays raw feeling onto the page, the songwriter's exact gift. And her Cancer Ascendant is the lunar mask of the matriarch, a soft, moon-faced presence that mothers and is mothered. Beauty as a beginning, and then the long, deliberate work.