It’s the final day of Cancer season in 2023 and I thought I would create an ‘honorable mention’ looking into the birth-chart of the gorgeous Isabelle Adjani, a French actress who won 5 times the prestigious Cesar French Film Award and was nominated for an Oscar. She’s a fascinating person, not only due to her extra-ordinary beauty but also because of her strange personality, being known for her reclusiveness, vulnerability and strange interview comments.

Isabelle’s filmography includes some of the most intense performances I saw from a female lead and I always wondered whether I would be able to pick up from her chart what makes her gravitate towards these unusual cinematic performances. Her beauty alone would make her a prime contender for the role of a romantic heroine, but even when she chooses to play such roles (like in Queen Margot) the stories of her characters are ultimately tinged with blood, gore and despair. This week she re-appeared in the media due to her being accused of fraud by an ex-employee.

_{Image of Isabelle Adjani’s birth-chart from https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Isabelle_Adjani}

Isabelle’s big three astrological markers are her Sun in Cancer in the 4th house (conjunct Mars and Uranus), her Ascendant in Aries and her Moon in Libra in the 6th house (conjunct Neptune). She has a balanced mix of Air, Water and Fire in her chart, however these energies also portray a person who grew up in an environment in which the parents were in conflict and which might have taught her to internalize a set of contradictory values (this is a typical marker of a person born with a Sun square Moon aspect). We see here a person who is governed by the changeable and mysterious nature of the Moon, since she is not only a Cancerian but her Sun is also placed in the house naturally ruled by Cancer and the Moon, the private 4th house. So it could be said that she is a double-Cancerian, which means that the qualities and defects of this maternal sign, tend to be amplified in her energy. Her Sun’s placement in the 4th house is an indicator of just how naturally comfortable she feels away from the public eye and indeed many have called her ‘reclusive’. The Sun shows what our life revolves around, if you consider how the planets in our solar system revolve around the Sun, in much the same way the markers in a natal chart are also warmed and supported by the center of our focus in this lifetime, our identity (the Sun).

So for Isabelle, her life revolves around her home, her relationship to her family members, and I guess that she identifies strongly with her role as a mother. She is a person with a rich inner world and with some powerful emotions (Sun conjunct Mars). Emotions come over her in surprising ways and she is meant to learn and grow from her emotional reactivity (Mars conjunct Uranus). This is someone who can fly into fits of anger or passionate love and then as quickly she can detach and observe her reaction in order to extract wisdom from it and emotionally expand, especially if we look at her analytical Moon in Libra placement. I believe that this is why is such a good actress because she is able to feel things strongly but then she is also capable of detaching from this intimate intensity.

As a Cancerian she is natural born artist, with a phenomenal sensitivity and intuition. Indeed, this purity of method s obvious on screen, as you can almost touch her vulnerability, making her acting an almost palpable experience. However, there is a fury attached to this emotionality, a sense of mischievousness and cool control, which is given to her by her Uranus and Mars in Cancer placements. Her home life and private inner world is restless and electrifying with these placements flanking at the root of her being, the seat of the soul in astrology, the Immum Coeli. However, because her Ascendant is in brave and creative Aries, she is able to easily display the rich emotional content she has harvested inside, in those deep moments of reflection and analysis (due to her analytical Moon in Libra in the Virgoan and pragmatic 6th house). She acts from a deep and instinctive place and her characters seems pragmatic and visceral in their performances. She could deliver an over the top performance for sure, but her acting never seems inauthentic, and that is truly a gift. Isabelle calls her acting something akin to cellular memory retrieval (or ‘memoire cellulaire‘).

_{Movies stills of Isabelle Adjani from (top to bottom): Queen Margot (1994), Possession (1981) and The Story of Adele H. (1975)}

Another interesting thing stands out of Isabelle’s chart: she has the so-called ‘mogul’ aspect of wealth & prestige in her chart, a powerful Jupiter conjunct Pluto in Leo in the 5th house. This aspect again underlines her destiny as an actress and performer and talks about experiencing a lot of joy and drawing her power from acting and performing, from showcasing her skills on stage, in front of other people. In addition, this is also a marker of a mother who really enjoyed her role of bringing children into the world and raising them, but she might’ve also been too intense, jealous and intimidating in her children’s eyes.

The 5th house rules also over short-term romances and great passions, so with this hot Jupiter (joy, expansion, luck) conjunct Pluto (intensity, drama, sexuality) in the combative and exuberant sign of Leo, you can only imagine the type of consuming love-affairs she had in her personal life. As a public, we know mostly of her relationships to Bruno Nuyten, Daniel Day Lewis and Jean Michelle Jarre, relationships which unfortunately ended up in separations and from which Isabelle remained with two rather handsome boys. It is said that Daniel Day Lewis (an Aries Sun) broke the news to Isabelle that he was leaving her by means of a fax when she was 7 months pregnant with their son (wow!). Isabelle, seems to not have that much luck in love and her personal relationships, as beautiful and talented as she is. She lost her brother in 2010 & some say that she got secretly married to a mysterious man in 2022.

The reasons why I am bringing up these separations and her loss is because we can see that she has a lot of love-related karma, since her Saturn is placed in intense Scorpio and in the house of other people and marriage, the 7th house. The fraud accusations seem to tall in line with this Saturnian presence which shows that some of the toughest karma Isabelle had to endure in this lifetime is related to her lovers, family members and business associates. Again secret intimacy, delayed or non-existing marriage, broken contractual agreements and tax-related issues are some of the most Saturn in Scorpio themes one could experience. A Saturn in Scorpio tends to freeze emotions and gives one issues related to sexuality and sexual pleasure. It puts one face to face with some painful emotional decisions and it can make a person either abstain from sex completely or become a Mary Magdalene character. The most difficult aspect is learning how to trust others and how to open up and show vulnerability. I guess we can see that Isabelle succeeds in her karmic ‘vulnerability test’, at least in her public role as an actress, but we won’t know for sure how painful this placement must’ve been for her in private.

And speaking about showing emotions and putting in the work of trusting more, Isabelle has another interesting aspect that reflects how her path in this lifetime is changing from one of a rational and detached soul story, to a passionate and feisty one. She has her South Node in Gemini in the 3rd house (this is her comfort zone), and her North Node in Sagittarius in the 9th house (this is her growth zone). Again we see a marker of natural-born actress, with her comfort zone being in the sign of the zodiac’s jester, Gemini. In addition, we know that she was born into a family with parents from different cultures and she was bilingual from an early age. So the visceral intensity that we see on screen is a direct influence of Isabelle working her dramatic Saturn in Scorpio in tandem with her South Node in Gemini/North Node in Sagittarius axis, which are both basically urging her soul to feel and to become more emotionally expressive. She is meant to let go of over-thinking things, playing the Devil’s advocate or being just cynical and intellectually detached from life (Gemini) and to display authenticity, to fight for what is right, to showcase passion and concentrate her energy on achieving one important goal at a time (Sagittarius). Her soul is moving her from a past-lifetime legacy of pessimism and duality, to a perception of life as an adventure replete with drama, passionate fights, and the search for truth and freedom.

I am hopelessly attracted to women who act in difficult roles, women who are brave and take risks in their career, women who seem complicated and who radiate a special kind of light, and I wrote about them in a previous post. So I understand if Isabelle might not be for everyone’s taste. But if you are like me (aka a Millennial who grew up watching French movies in her high-school years) and enjoy such a personality, for further explorations of Adjani’s work (especially if you are new to her) you can begin with these movies . I also enjoyed this video commentary of her extra-ordinarily disturbing performance in Possession (1981) Check them out and let me know your thoughts.

With universal love,

Lexi