Born in Brooklyn Heights in 1907, Barbara Stanwyck was an atypical Cancer, with both her moon and her rising sign in Virgo and with Gemini as her midheaven. A talented actress (Mercury in Leo), she was able to project a wide variety of women -- a paranoid hypochondriac, a confidence artist, a calculating femme fatale, an unflappable witness to a murder -- in modes tragic or comic.
According to Babylonian star-interpretation, Stanwyck's Virgoesque self-restraint combined with the gush of emotion that comes from having not only her sun but her Venus, Jupiter, and Neptune in Cancer. She was a good businesswoman (Mars in Capricorn) but prone to morbidity (Saturn in Pisces).
The actresses of the 1940s -- Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Ingrid Bergman -- belie the notion that women born before before the age of female enlightenment lacked strong models who could be psychiatrists, could solve murders or commit them, could go crazy, could run a restaurant, pack a gun, slap her daughter, commit adultery, or risk her life as an American agent in South America during World War II.
Barbara Stanwyck, from a working class background, went to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. She became very rich thanks to shrewd investments (Mars in Capricorn). It figures that she never won an Oscar though she was nominated four times. Her real name was Ruby Stevens. She was hilarious in "The Lady Eve" and superb in "Golden Boy." She helped William Holden get the title part and became Holden's lucky star. In 1939 she married Robert Taylor. Whisperers said it was a sham designed to get gullible people to believe the two stars were heterosexual. She kept the ranch and horses when they divorced in 1951. Robert Wagner said he had a four-year affair with her. Could be.
Stanwyck had a sharp tongue. She defined "egotism" as "usually just a case of mistaken nonentity." She took one look at the script and started laughing. What's the matter? Be a good lad and re-fill my glass. Scotch, rocks, no water. You know what my biggest problem is? My biggest problem is trying to figure out how to play my fortieth fallen female different from my thirty-ninth.
-- DL
