Born With Venus Retrograde: Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Amy Winehouse and the Pentagram of Venus

Jack Nicholson was born on April 22, 1937, and Sam Altman on April 22, 1985. On both days Venus, seen from Earth, was moving backward through Aries. That is what astrologers mean by Venus retrograde in the birth chart, and about 1 person in 14 has it. Of the 3,436 famous people in our "What's rare in your chart" chapter, 241 do, among them Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Robert De Niro, Charlize Theron, Amy Winehouse, Tom Hanks and Zinedine Zidane. Venus is retrograde again right now, from October 3 to November 14, 2026, so every baby born in these weeks will share it. We mapped where Venus turns back, and their birthdays sit on the five points of one star. Then we gathered moments when they followed their own taste or returned to the same people, all from interviews and archives, linked at the end. Birth times weren't needed: Venus turns slowly, and every person here had it retrograde for their whole birthday.

Why Venus seems to move backward

Venus is closer to the Sun than we are and laps it faster. Every 584 days, roughly every 19 months, it catches up with Earth and passes between us and the Sun. For those weeks the planet appears from Earth to stop and reverse through the zodiac, which is all the word "retrograde" means. Each spell lasts 41 to 43 days. We counted every one between 1880 and 2030: there are 94, and together they cover 7.18% of the time. Our chapter's table of 100,000 charts for people born from 1960 to 2008 gives almost the same share, 7.12%.

The summer of 1983 shows what one of these spells looks like. On August 3 Venus stood still at 9.5° Virgo, spent six weeks sliding back and turned forward again at 23° Leo on September 15. Chris Hemsworth, Mila Kunis, Andrew Garfield and Amy Winehouse were all born inside those six weeks, and halfway through, on August 25, Venus passed exactly between Earth and the Sun.

Five places where Venus turns back

The turns follow a rhythm. Five retrograde spells fit almost exactly into eight years, and then the cycle repeats in nearly the same parts of the zodiac, each time 2.3° earlier. Every turn lands about three-fifths of the way around the circle from the one before, so if you join five neighbors in order you draw a five-pointed star. It's known as the pentagram of Venus.

The people in this article fall neatly onto its five points. Nicholson and Altman are 48 years, or six eight-year cycles, apart on the Aries point, which they share with Charlie Chaplin (1889), Audrey Hepburn (1929) and Keira Knightley (1985). Tom Hanks and Anthony Bourdain were born in the same spell of 1956, Zinedine Zidane 16 years later on the same Gemini–Cancer point, and Tom Holland 24 years after that. Robert De Niro (1943), Charlize Theron (1975) and the whole summer of 1983 share the Virgo point, while Muhammad Ali (1942), Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy (1966) and Christian Bale (1974) were born on the one in Aquarius.

The fifth point is in Scorpio, and that is where Venus is turning right now. Jodie Foster (1962), Ethan Hawke (1970), Rachel McAdams (1978), Drake and Emilia Clarke (1986), and Margaret Qualley and Zoey Deutch (1994) were all born on it. If your birthday falls in the fall of 1962, 1970, 1978, 1986, 1994, 2002, 2010 or 2018, your Venus may be retrograde too; your chart will tell you for sure.

What astrology reads into it

In astrology Venus stands for love, taste and what a person values. The classical tradition counted moving backward as a weakness: William Lilly, in his Christian Astrology of 1647, took five points off a retrograde planet. Our chapter reads it more gently and calls it "Your own measure in love": "In love and in taste you live by your own measure: what is fashionable or approved by others barely touches you. You take a long time to check what truly matters to you, and you return to people from your past more than most."

We'll leave their love lives alone. Taste and the habit of going back show up just as clearly in their work, and you can decide for yourself whether the reading fits.

Going by their own taste

In May 1929, with the talkies taking over, Charlie Chaplin told Gladys Hall of Motion Picture Magazine: "They are spoiling the oldest art in the world — the art of pantomime. They are ruining the great beauty of silence." His next film, City Lights, came out in 1931 without a single spoken line, carried by sound effects and a score he wrote himself. His biographer Jeffrey Vance puts it simply: only a small part of the world speaks English, pantomime is universal, and "the Tramp could not have a voice."

Audrey Hepburn went to Hubert de Givenchy in Paris in July 1953 for clothes to wear in Sabrina. The film's costume designer, Edith Head, had warned her off "dead black or dead white" and suggested navy or charcoal; Hepburn chose a black Givenchy cocktail dress anyway. It was the start of a 40-year friendship, and she said of his clothes: "His are the only clothes in which I am myself. He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality." People say much the same of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, who worked at Calvin Klein in the 1990s. Narciso Rodriguez, who became her close friend there, remembered that "her style was never a production" and that "she didn't need to be told what to wear."

Jack Nicholson first turned down Frank Costello, the Boston mob boss in Martin Scorsese's The Departed. "The character seemed a little regular," he said. "And I don't want to play a regular anything." He said yes once he'd decided to rework the part: "I told myself I'd do the movie if Martin could handle the things I hurled his way."

After 2 Days in the Valley (1996), Charlize Theron was offered one bombshell part after another and kept saying no. "A lot of people were saying, 'You should just hit while the iron's hot.' But playing the same part over and over doesn't leave you with any longevity," she told W magazine in 2008, adding that more interesting stories came her way "about what we consider real people than about glamorous, beautiful people." In 2004 she won the Oscar for Monster. Keira Knightley once admitted she felt bad about doing so many period films, "and then all of a sudden I went, 'Ok, this is obviously my taste. I'm drawn to this.'"

After Mean Girls and The Notebook, Rachel McAdams took a two-year break and passed on The Devil Wears Prada, Casino Royale, Iron Man, Get Smart and Mission: Impossible III. She knew she was "in such a lucky spot," she told Bustle in 2023, "but I also knew it wasn't quite jiving with my personality and what I needed to stay sane." The same year she skipped the Walmart ad that reunited the Mean Girls cast: "A movie sounded awesome, but I've never done commercials, and it just didn't feel like my bag."

Amy Winehouse followed her jazz debut, Frank, with Back to Black and its 1960s sound. "I'm not a jazz girl any more," she told The Sun in 2006. "I've been listening to '60s bands and girl groups and it came out in the writing on Back to Black." Mark Ronson remembered their first meeting: "She played me all this great '60s music, and I got very inspired, and I came up with this piano part."

In 1999, while still a New York chef, Anthony Bourdain wrote a piece for The New Yorker about what cooks think of their customers. Brunch fans got theirs: "You can dress brunch up with all the focaccia, smoked salmon, and caviar in the world, but it's still breakfast."

Coming back to the same people

Ethan Hawke kept returning to the same people and the same characters. In 1995 he starred opposite Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise; the three of them made Before Sunset in 2004 and Before Midnight in 2013. "It's not like anybody was begging us to make a sequel," Hawke said. With Linklater he also spent 12 years shooting Boyhood, with no contracts at all: "The whole thing was an act of faith. You know, it's illegal to make someone work on — sign a contract for more than seven years, right? So we never had any deals."

Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese knew each other as teenagers in New York's Little Italy, lost touch, and were reintroduced by Brian De Palma in time to make Mean Streets in 1973. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) was their tenth film together. "I have a long-standing relationship working with Marty," De Niro said. "That's because we have fun working together." Scorsese has said he resisted Raging Bull for several years, until De Niro talked him into it.

Tom Hanks got his professional start at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland. When he made his directing debut, That Thing You Do!, in 1996, he cast "a bunch of old friends from the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in it," as he told a BAFTA audience. In 2009 he went back to the same Cleveland theater to talk to NPR about his early years on stage.

Zinedine Zidane quit as Real Madrid coach at the end of May 2018, five days after winning a third Champions League in a row, and came back on March 11, 2019. "I left because I needed to. Now I'm very happy to come home. After nine months I want to coach again," he told the press.

On November 17, 2023, the OpenAI board removed Sam Altman as chief executive. Twelve days later he wrote to staff: "I am returning to OpenAI as CEO." And Tom Holland, cast as Fred Astaire, promised to "dust off the old tap shoes and go back to Pineapple Dance Studios" in London to start taking tap lessons again.

Retrograde dates are in UTC and birth dates come from Wikidata. Venus was retrograde for every person's entire birthday in any time zone.

Where the method stops

We picked these stories knowing what we were looking for, and any long career has room for both loyalty and sudden departures. Psychologists call this confirmation bias: when you know what you're looking for, you find it. There is a stricter test, though. Among the famous people in our database, 7.0% have Venus retrograde, against 7.1% of everyone. If the trait helped people become famous, there would be noticeably more of them, so it isn't what made these people stars.

One in 14 means more than half a billion people alive today, and every one of them lives it differently. Venus retrograde is one line in a chart, and how it plays out depends on everything else in it. We left houses and the Moon out of this piece because they need an exact birth time.

How to check your own chart

Calculate your birth chart; retrograde planets are marked with an R. The reading includes the chapter "What's rare in your chart," which shows the rare traits you have, how common each one is and which famous people share them with you. If your Venus is retrograde, you'll usually see someone famous with the same trait listed next to it.