Michael McElhatton

Michael McElhatton is the kind of Irish actor who disappears so completely into a role that you forget there is a craftsman underneath, and craftsman is exactly the word. Born in Terenure on Dublin's south side and trained at RADA, he built a career the Virgo way: not by chasing the limelight but by being useful, precise and quietly indispensable. A Virgo Sun shines through mastery and hard work, the jack of all arts who becomes a master of all, and it shows in a man who both wrote and starred in Paths to Freedom, crafting the beloved character of Rats down to the last detail. Whether as the cold, calculating Roose Bolton in Game of Thrones or in Chernobyl, The Fall and Albert Nobbs, he serves the story rather than his own vanity, the true soul of the Virgin's virtue.

But watch the emotion he pours into those studied performances, and you meet his Cancer Moon, the luminary at home in its own sign, doubly tender and notoriously intuitive. That maternal, nostalgic, deeply feeling instinct is the reservoir he draws from. Virgo perfects the surface; Cancer supplies the ache beneath.