Ann Blyth Birth Chart: The Leo Sun Behind Mildred Pierce
Ann Blyth was sixteen when she filmed Mildred Pierce. She died June 25, 2026 at 98, with transiting Pluto closing within two degrees of opposing her natal Mercury in Leo.
Ann Blyth Birth Chart: The Leo Sun Behind Mildred Pierce
Ann Blyth was sixteen when she filmed Mildred Pierce. She died June 25, 2026 at 98, with transiting Pluto closing within two degrees of opposing her natal Mercury in Leo.
Photo: The Lane Company / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain) · Stock
By Sera Vane·June 26, 2026AI-assisted, editor-reviewed
In late 1944, Ann Blyth was sixteen years old, on loan from Universal to Warner Bros. to play Veda Pierce in Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce: the cold-blooded daughter who destroys her own mother, the role that would earn Blyth a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the 18th Academy Awards and, in Joan Crawford's working memory, the kid who walked into the screen test and stole the picture outright. She died June 25, 2026 of natural causes at 98, two months shy of her 99th birthday, closing an arc of more than seven decades that ran from MGM soundstages through Broadway revivals of
. Her chart is a Leo signature, with Sun, Mercury, and Neptune all stacked in the sign of performance, and transiting Pluto in Aquarius now sits within two degrees of opposing that natal Mercury: the closing pattern that tracks with a working actor's voice completing its passage from living performance into permanent cultural inheritance.
Ann Blyth, Chart Snapshot
Sun
22°46' Leo
Moon
10°27' Aries
Mercury
6°41' Leo
Venus
24°43' Virgo
Mars
14°02' Virgo
Jupiter-Uranus Conjunction
2° Aries, both retrograde, 0.21° orb
Saturn
1°07' Sagittarius
Active Transit (June 25, 2026)
Pluto in Aquarius opposing natal Mercury (orb 1.72°)
Birth Date and Place
August 16, 1927; Mount Kisco, New York
Birth Time
Noon fallback (no verified time; Astro-Databank, Rodden C)
What Happened This Week
Ann Blyth died of natural causes on June 25, 2026 at 98, with her daughter Eileen McNulty confirming the death to Deadline. The obituary in Variety traces the long timeline: Broadway debut at thirteen in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine in 1941, film debut in Chip Off the Old Block in 1944, the Mildred Pierce nomination at sixteen for filming done in 1944 and 1945, more than a decade of MGM musicals capped by introducing 'The Loveliest Night of the Year' opposite Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso (1951), and a decisive pivot to live theatre and television guest work in the late 1950s. She married the Los Angeles obstetrician Dr. James McNulty, brother of singer Dennis Day, in 1953; he died in 2007. She is survived by five children, ten grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
“
I knew that other people wanted the part as well but I was the lucky one because Joan Crawford did the test with me, and it made a world of difference.
— Ann Blyth on the Mildred Pierce screen test, interview with Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 2013
The Leo Stellium Behind the Villainess
A stellium is what astrologers call a stack of three or more planets crowded into a single sign, and Blyth's chart carries one in Leo. Sun at 22°, Mercury at 6°, Neptune at 26°. Three placements in the sign of performance, voice, and applause, all of them personal or expressive. Her Leo Sun is the engine of the seventy-year run; the Mercury is the actor's instrument, the precise, musical articulation she carried through every Broadway revival and every guest spot in The Twilight Zone. Neptune in the same sign is the fog machine, the placement of the porous self that can fully inhabit characters the actor personally finds repellent. Marlene Dietrich carried a different kind of Leo signature, but the appetite for transformation reads the same: a performer who can be more legible on camera than she is to herself.
Here is what that stack cost her. The Sun-Neptune conjunction (two planets locked within four degrees of each other in the same sign, the Sun's identity fused to Neptune's solvent) is the actor's gift and the actor's quiet tax. It gave her Veda Pierce in a way that frightened audiences, a scheming daughter who reads as genuinely dangerous because the actor's self has dissolved into her. The same conjunction tends toward typecasting after a breakout role, because directors keep asking for the same dissolution. Blyth was steered into ingénue parts and singing roles after Mildred Pierce, and her contract was not renewed at the height of her box-office value once the studio decided her image had narrowed. Neptune fuses; Neptune also blurs the working actor's name into the iconic part. She spent the next decade trying to widen the lens, and the films stopped coming.
The Aries Engine: Jupiter Conjunct Uranus at a Fifth of a Degree
Look at the Aries side of her chart and you find the breakthrough placement that astrologers occasionally see once a decade: Jupiter conjunct Uranus, fused at a fifth of a degree of orb. That is the pattern for the unknown who walks into a screen test cold and walks out with the role of the century. Sam Smith carries a related Jupiter-Uranus rhythm in a different sign, also tracking with an early-career rupture into visibility, though Smith's plays out in pop music rather than studio film. Blyth's fired in late 1944, at sixteen years old, when she was loaned to Warner Bros. and Joan Crawford agreed to do the screen test alongside her, a generosity Blyth named publicly for the rest of her life. The Saturn in Sagittarius trine to that Jupiter-Uranus pair, the easy-flow 120-degree angle astrologers call a trine, is the discipline that kept the breakthrough from burning out. She did not blow her shot, did not unravel, did not become a cautionary tale. She kept showing up.
But the Aries engine has a cost beat of its own. Jupiter and Uranus in Aries reward speed and singularity; they punish patience. After 1957 the film offers slowed, and the same chart that detonated her career at sixteen had nothing to say about the slow industrial work of sustaining one. She moved to stage, to television guest work, to live concert performance. The Saturn window that opens after every public breakthrough lands here as a long structural contraction rather than a single hard year. The Aries pair gave her the lightning; the Saturn trine gave her the staying power; what neither gave her was the ability to manufacture a second detonation on demand.
Pluto's Closing Opposition to Her Mercury
Look at where the sky was sitting on June 25 and the chart's closing aspect comes into focus. Transiting Pluto in Aquarius at nearly 5° has been pressing within two degrees of opposing her natal Mercury at 6° Leo for months. An opposition (two planets 180 degrees apart, facing each other across the chart) is the angle astrologers read as crystallization, a long pattern coming to its finished form. Pluto's job in a chart is to compress, to distill, to make permanent. When transiting Pluto pulls into that close opposition with the natal voice planet of a 98-year-old performer in her final weeks, the pattern is not predictive (the chart did not cause the death, and we will not pretend otherwise) but it is structurally legible. The living voice she carried through eighty years of stages and microphones finishes its translation into the cultural record that outlasts the body.
Neptune in Aries is doing parallel work on the Aries side of the chart, sitting within two degrees of conjoining the natal Jupiter-Uranus pair that lit her career at sixteen. Neptune dissolves the structures it touches, and what it dissolves here is the boundary between the working actor and the legacy. The lightning of 1945 ceases to belong to a private body and becomes public inheritance. That dissolution does not look like loss when it works on a completed life. It looks like the slow industrial work of cultural memory consolidating around the few permanent images a long career generates.
What This Chart Asks Us to See
Hollywood will produce its own valedictories this week, and most of them will fold Blyth into the standard golden-age obituary template: the discovery, the breakthrough, the contraction, the long stage twilight. The chart says something a little more specific. The Leo stellium that gave her Veda Pierce was the same architecture that kept her working when most of her 1940s peers were already names on memorial plaques; the Sun-Neptune conjunction that let her play the most hated daughter in Hollywood is also the placement that turned a single villainess role into a lifelong calling card she could never quite outrun. The Aries Jupiter-Uranus pair lit one of the cleanest breakthroughs in studio history, and the Saturn trine kept that breakthrough productive for decades when the more obvious pattern would have been a flameout. Brandon Flowers' Cancer Sun arriving at the Thrasher pivot reads a different version of the same problem: a working artist with one defining register figuring out what to do when the public stops asking for the early version.
The Pluto opposition to her Mercury closing in the final week of June 2026 is the chart's punctuation. It does not explain why she died (natural causes at 98 explains that), but it does name what is happening in the public space around her death: the long compression of a working life into the few permanent images the culture keeps. Veda staring across the breakfast table at Mildred. The clear soprano on 'The Loveliest Night of the Year.' The screen-test story she told for seventy years about a generous co-star at the right moment. Those are the artifacts the Mercury-Pluto opposition leaves behind. The actor is done; the actor's voice is now everyone's.
For entertainment and self-reflection purposes. Not predictive and not a substitute for professional advice.
What is Ann Blyth's zodiac sign?
Ann Blyth was a Leo Sun, born August 16, 1927 in Mount Kisco, New York. Her Sun sat at 22 degrees Leo, joined in the same sign by Mercury at 6 degrees and Neptune at 26 degrees. The three planets form a Leo stellium that astrologers read as a chart built for performance and visibility.
How did Ann Blyth die?
Ann Blyth died of natural causes on June 25, 2026 at her home, two months before her 99th birthday. Her daughter Eileen McNulty confirmed the death to Deadline. She is survived by five children, ten grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren, and her husband Dr. James McNulty died in 2007.
Why was Ann Blyth typecast after Mildred Pierce?
A Sun conjunct Neptune in Leo gives an actor the ability to dissolve completely into a character, which is what made Veda Pierce read as genuinely menacing. Studios then keep casting for the same dissolution. Her MGM contract was not renewed in 1957 because the studio had narrowed her perceived range to ingénue and singing roles.
What does a Sun-Neptune conjunction mean in a chart?
A Sun-Neptune conjunction places both planets in the same sign at a tight orb, fusing identity with imagination. People with this aspect often work in performance, fashion, music, or film, because the self is porous enough to inhabit other identities. The cost is a softer hold on personal boundaries and being remembered for a role.
Which actors share Ann Blyth's August 16 birthday?
Several public figures share Ann Blyth's August 16 birthday, including Madonna (born 1958), James Cameron (1954), and Steve Carell (1962). All three are Leo Suns near the same degree, and each shows the sign's signature appetite for visibility and creative authorship, expressed through pop music, blockbuster cinema, and television comedy respectively.
