Robin Williams

Some souls are born to shine as nurturers, and Robin Williams was exactly that. His Sun sat in Cancer, the sign of the mother, the crab who hides a squishy, tender heart inside a hard shell. This is a very emotional Sun, a big-hearted, intuitive, almost psychic vitality, here to protect and to comfort. And that Cancer Sun fell in his seventh house, the house of partnership: wherever the Sun goes we tend to shine, and Robin shone through others, feeling most complete when he was uniting, playing off, making an audience laugh with him rather than at anyone. His improvised whirlwinds, from Mork in the late 1970s through Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society and his Oscar-winning turn in Good Will Hunting, were all acts of connection.

His Moon rested in Pisces, the ultimate empath, a sponge of a Moon tuned to the spirit realm, giving him divine-level imagination and boundless compassion. It is also the addict's Moon at its lower turn, prone to escape through the fog rather than through art. Behind the Capricorn mask of the patient old soul, that Piscean tenderness carried both his genius and his fragility. He was, and remains, deeply loved.