Princess Soraya Pahlavi

Princess Soraya Pahlavi carried a beautiful, aching contradiction her whole life: the woman she described as one part methodically European, one part savagely Persian, forever between two worlds and never wholly of either. Born in Isfahan in 1932 to a Bakhtiari nobleman and a German mother, raised between Berlin and Iran, educated in London and Switzerland, she became Queen of Iran in 1951 as the second wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who is widely believed to have loved her most of all.

Her Sun in Cancer in the fourth house is the most tender, home-bound placement of all: the soul that shines through family, mother and hearth, whose happiness is bound up entirely with belonging. So the great sorrow of her life cut deep, for when it became clear she could not bear an heir, the marriage she refused to share ended in divorce in 1958, and the home she was born to shine in was taken from her.

With both her Moon and Ascendant in Aquarius in the twelfth, she wore the mask of the beautiful outsider, the alien on Earth, detached and dissolving. After a brief turn as an actress, she lived out her years alone in Paris, a queen apart.