Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr was called the most beautiful woman in film, yet the truest thing about her lived beneath the surface, exactly as her Scorpio Sun would have it: power held through the mind, the eagle at her core, the strategist who could read a situation from miles off and reinvent herself again and again, a phoenix rising from the ashes. That Sun shone in the fifth house, the house of the Sun's own creativity, romance and play, so she was born to be seen, radiant and magnetic on the screen. Fleeing her first husband, an Austrian arms manufacturer, she slipped away to Paris and then London, met Louis B. Mayer, and became a star in Algiers in 1938, later crowning her career as Delilah in DeMille's Samson and Delilah. Her Moon in Leo made her king and queen in one, a big, dramatic, performing heart; set in the second house of income and worth, her security was fused to what she made and valued. Cancer rose as her mask, the lunar face, soft and guarded at once. But it was that Scorpionic depth that mattered most: during the war she and George Antheil devised a frequency-hopping guidance system for torpedoes, the spread-spectrum idea that quietly seeded the wireless world. Beauty on the surface, genius beneath.