Margot Fonteyn

Cinema is an educating media, not just entertaining, and BBC is especially invaluable in providing biopics of exceptional quality. I just watched a film about Margo Fonteyn, and her miserable family life attracted my “scientific curiosity”.

Even the brief wiki info speaks for itself. “During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Fonteyn had a long relationship with composer Constant Lambert which did not lead to marriage. In 1955, Fonteyn married Dr. Roberto Arias, a Panamanian diplomat to London and playboy. Their marriage was initially a rocky one due to his infidelities. In 1964, a rival Panamanian politician shot Arias, leaving him a quadriplegic for the rest of his life”. The relationship with Nuriev, who was “notoriously impulsive and did not have much patience with rules, limitations and hierarchical order”, ended up in separation. To pay medical bills for her paralised husband, Fontayn should go on tours at quite elderly age, and “during Fonteyn's absence from Panama on tour as a ballerina, a socialite named Anabella Vallarino would move into the house as his shadow wife and move out again before Fonteyn's return.”

Reading all this, I recalled Cardano’s aphorism about affliction of family life. In Lilly’s edition, it is N 2.75: “A prime cause of men leading single live is the combustion of the Moon in their nativities with Saturn, or eminently afflicted by him, so in women if a planet be combust or the Sun in Taurus greatly afflicted.”

My immediate hypothesis was that Fontayn's Sun should be afflicted as Cardano described. And here is her natal chart, with Sun in Taurus in conjunction with detrimented Mars on Algol and in square with detrimented Saturn.