Craig Ferguson Birth Chart

What complicates the Taurus narrative is the Scorpio Moon directly opposite — we will get to it next — but it is worth naming the other contradiction first. The Sun makes an exact square to Uranus at 26°28' Leo (an orb of 0°10', which is as tight as natal aspects get). That is the signature of a man who cannot live the life Taurus asks him to live, no matter how much of him wants to. Every time the routine settles, something in him kicks the table over.

The Moon at 4°20' Scorpio sits in the 1st house, conjunct his Libra ascendant within nine degrees and right on top of natal Neptune at 11°43' Scorpio. This is one of the most exposed Moons you can have. The 1st house is the house of self-presentation; the Moon there is the house of feeling. Put a Scorpio Moon in the 1st and you get a person whose emotional life is permanently visible — not by choice, but because Scorpio cannot do casual and the 1st house cannot do hidden.

The Moon-Neptune conjunction is the signature on the file. It indicates an emotional imagination that runs hot, dissolves boundaries between self and material, and historically correlates with sensitivity to substances. Ferguson has been <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Ferguson">sober since 1992</a>, and he has discussed it as the foundational fact of his adult life. The chart does not predict alcoholism — millions of Moon-Neptune people do not drink — but it does predict that whatever the person feels, they feel it through a slightly permeable membrane. The 1992 break is what Saturn does to Moon-Neptune people who survive: it gives them a wall.

The contradiction with the Taurus Sun is structural. Sun in Taurus wants the meal, the marriage, the regular paycheck. Moon in Scorpio in the 1st wants to look directly at whatever is most uncomfortable in the room and name it. The Late Late Show monologues, particularly the unscripted ones after his father's death and after Britney Spears's 2007 breakdown, were Scorpio Moon broadcasts in the most literal sense — emotional weather running directly across the camera while the Taurus Sun stayed seated.

The ascendant at 25°16' Libra means Ferguson presents to the world through the lens of charm, balance, and verbal grace. Libra rising is the diplomat's mask: it softens edges, finds the symmetrical phrase, and instinctively manages the temperature of the room. It is also why a man with a Scorpio Moon and an 8th-house Sun could host a network show for ten years without alienating CBS — the Libra rising was doing the social labor while the Scorpio Moon was doing the talking.

What Libra rising costs is decisiveness. The trade-off is real. Libra weighs, defers, performs the room — and when it sits over a Scorpio Moon that already feels everything, the result is a person who can spend an enormous amount of energy modulating an emotional life that is loud whether or not he wants it to be. The exact Sun-Uranus square (we will return to this in the aspects section) makes the polish breakable: the Libra surface holds until the Uranian streak fires, and then the show goes off-script.

The complication here is the Moon's nine-degree conjunction to the ascendant. A Scorpio Moon that close to a Libra rising means the diplomatic surface is constantly being undercut by visible feeling. It is why Ferguson's interview style — confessional, intimate, willing to break the format on camera — felt distinct from his peers. The mask was Libra; the face under it was Scorpio.

Mercury at 17°25' Gemini and Venus at 23°29' Gemini both sit in the 8th house alongside the Taurus Sun, forming a tight Mercury-Venus conjunction (orb 6°). This is the writer's signature: Mercury in its home sign, charming Venus close behind, both placed in the house of intimacy and shared depth. The combination produces wit that is not surface — Gemini does the speed, but the 8th house drags every joke toward something the speaker cannot quite get over.

Ferguson's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Ferguson">2009 memoir American on Purpose</a> is a Mercury-Venus-in-the-8th document: it reads like a stand-up set written by someone who has been to two AA meetings that morning. The 2006 novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Ferguson">Between the Bridge and the River</a> stretches the same voice into fiction — comic on the surface, theological underneath. Mercury also forms a wide trine to Saturn at 11°23' Aquarius (orb 6°), which is the discipline coordinate: it is the aspect that lets a Gemini Mercury in the most volatile of houses still hit a deadline.

Mars at 21°30' Aries in the 6th house is the engine. Mars in its own sign in the house of daily work means the work ethic is not optional; it is a survival instrument. This is the part of the chart that explains 2,058 episodes of late-night television over ten years — Aries Mars does not produce people who stop, and the 6th house puts the fight directly into routine. The cost is restlessness that can curdle into impatience or, untreated, the kind of self-medication that drove the 1992 reckoning. Aries Mars wants to push; the 6th house gives it nowhere to push except into the next task.

This is the aspect to take seriously. Saturn at 11°23' Aquarius squares Neptune at 11°43' Scorpio with an orb of 0°20' — exact, applying, in fixed signs. Saturn-Neptune squares are the boundary-versus-dissolution signature: Saturn wants structure, accountability, and a wall between self and chemical; Neptune wants to dissolve, to surrender, to escape the small self into something larger. When the two are exactly square in a chart, the person spends a lifetime negotiating the line between discipline and disappearance.

In Ferguson's biography, the 1992 sobriety date is the visible expression of this aspect resolving in Saturn's favor — but the work does not end. Saturn-Neptune squares produce people who, even decades into recovery, are organizing their life around the wall they had to build. It is the signature behind his repeated public framing of sobriety not as an event but as a daily structure. The cost is that the structure is never optional; the gift is the texture of self-knowledge that comes from having to build one consciously.

Jupiter at 9°31' Pisces in the 4th house opposes Pluto at 7°31' Virgo in the 10th (orb 2°). This is the public-private power axis: Jupiter wants expansion at home, around the family, in the imagination; Pluto wants control out there, in career, in legacy. The opposition produces a person who cannot fully relax into either. The fame Pluto demanded across the 10th house was real — late-night, awards, books — but Jupiter in the 4th kept asking whether the visibility was worth what it cost the private life.

This aspect also explains the choice to walk away. Ferguson left the Late Late Show in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Ferguson">December 2014</a> at the height of cultural goodwill, before the network pushed him out. Pluto in the 10th would have stayed for the power; Jupiter in the 4th wanted his sons. The opposition forced a choice, and the chart suggests the choice was not painless on either side.

The tightest natal aspect in the chart is the Sun-Uranus square. Uranus at 26°28' Leo in the 10th house squares the Sun in the 8th by exactly ten arc-minutes. This is the aspect that makes the routine break. Sun in Taurus wants the long arc, the steady role, the brand. Uranus in the 10th wants to flip the table, change the format, leave at the peak. You cannot have both, and the orb is too tight to ignore — every time the Taurus Sun settles into a stable identity, the Uranus square fires. It is the signature behind every career swerve from Mr. Wick on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drew_Carey_Show">The Drew Carey Show</a> (1996–2004) into network late-night, then out of late-night into novels, then into a podcast (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Ferguson">Joy</a>, launched 2023), then into a forthcoming game-show return. The chart does not let him repeat himself.

The complicating aspect to the hero narrative is the Saturn-North Node opposition. It tells us that the 10th-house career success was never quite the destination — the chart kept pulling him back to the 4th house, to the family, to the writing done at home. Compare him to <a href="/celebrities/jimmy-fallon">Jimmy Fallon</a>, another late-night host whose chart points him toward staying inside the institutional frame; Ferguson's 10th-house Uranus pattern points the opposite direction — toward exits, not endurance. The same placement reads differently when the rest of the chart asks different questions of it.

The career arc is unusual for a Taurus Sun. Most Taurus Suns build one thing well and stay. Ferguson's chart insists on the opposite: the Sun-Uranus square keeps firing, and the 10th-house Uranus in Leo means the public role itself has to be unconventional. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drew_Carey_Show">The Drew Carey Show role of Nigel Wick from 1996 to 2004</a> was the first stable American foothold; the move into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Late_Show_with_Craig_Ferguson">CBS late-night from 3 January 2005 to 19 December 2014</a> was the second; the post-late-night reinvention through novels, the podcast Joy on iHeartMedia from August 2023, and the announced 2026 return to broadcast television as host of Scrabble on The CW are the third, fourth, and fifth.

The astrological promise (Uranus in 10H Leo) and the actual career fit closely on one count: he was, by his own framing, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Ferguson">naturalized as a U.S. citizen on 1 February 2008</a> while hosting a network late-night show — an unusually disjunctive resume for the format. The Peabody Award in 2009 for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Tutu">Desmond Tutu interview episode</a> codified what the Scorpio Moon had been doing on camera all along: making late-night a place for unguarded conversation about death and faith, not a delivery vehicle for jokes about the news.

The tension is that Pluto in the 10th house wanted more than late-night gave him. The Daytime Emmys he won in 2015 and 2016 for hosting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_Name_Game">Celebrity Name Game</a> were a step down in cultural prestige from the Peabody, even as the wins themselves were real. Pluto-in-10 charts often feel the gap between the size of the public ambition and the shape of the actual career; the Jupiter opposition tells him the private life is the consolation, and most days it is enough.

Venus in Gemini in the 8th gives Ferguson a relationship signature that prefers verbal intimacy over conventional romance and tends to mature late. The biographical pattern fits — three marriages, with the third (to Megan Wallace-Cunningham, since 2008) the one that has held. Venus in the 8th does not want surface compatibility; it wants shared depth, including the parts of the partner most people would politely avoid. That tends to filter out everyone who is not ready to do that work, which can take time.

The 7th house is ruled by Aries (Mars, the chart's most active planet) and contains nothing tenanted, but the Mars-Aries-6H placement means the work he does feeds the partnership rather than competing with it — the marriage is the thing the long working day comes home to. The trade-off the chart sets up is that Venus in the 8th cannot do casual; the 1990s and early 2000s reads, in the chart, as a Venus that had to learn what it actually wanted by living through what it didn't. The 5th-house lord Saturn squaring Neptune complicates the romantic-fantasy register too: the chart resists idealization. He is on record about both the mistakes of his earlier marriages and the work of the current one, which is what a Venus-in-8th person looks like when they have stopped flinching from the material. <a href="/celebrities/cate-blanchett">Cate Blanchett's Taurus chart</a> shows what stable Venus placement looks like sustained from the start; Ferguson's shows what it looks like assembled, slowly, on the third try.

For late April 2026, the transit to watch is transiting Pluto at 5°29' Aquarius applying to Ferguson's natal Saturn at 11°23' Aquarius — an orb of roughly six degrees, closing slowly through 2026 and exact in 2028. Pluto-conjunct-natal-Saturn is one of the heaviest transits in the canon. It rewrites whatever Saturn structures a person has built — the disciplines, the walls, the institutional commitments — and asks whether they still serve.

For Ferguson, natal Saturn carries unusual weight. It is the planet that holds the Saturn-Neptune square together, which means it is the planet doing the work of his sobriety architecture. It also sits in the 4th house of home, family, and the private base that the Jupiter opposition told him to protect. Pluto coming to that point is not a transit about career chaos. It is a transit about the deep restructuring of the disciplines that have organized his adult life — the recovery work, the family-first rhythm, the writing schedule, the way he protects his interior.

The behavioral signature to expect through 2026 and 2027 is a quieter, more inward Ferguson, even as the public profile picks up again with the announced Scrabble hosting role. Pluto transits do not produce louder versions of people; they produce smaller, denser ones. The Saturn-Pluto contact specifically tends to surface what the person has been carrying privately for years — Saturn-Neptune charts under this transit often write the second memoir, not the third comedy hour. If the next book exists, the chart suggests it will be heavier than the last two. The risk is that Pluto can also test the structures it is restructuring — sobriety architecture under Pluto-Saturn benefits from ritualized recommitment, not improvisation. The chart has held this material for thirty-four years; Pluto is not a reason to relax it.

Craig Ferguson's chart is not the chart of a comedian who got lucky. It is the chart of a man whose Taurus Sun spent its entire life in a knife-fight with the rest of the placements — the Scorpio Moon insisting on visible feeling, the Sun-Uranus square refusing repetition, the Saturn-Neptune square enforcing a sobriety the chart did not pre-install but had to build from scratch. The contrarian read is that the affability so many viewers loved was not the chart's gift to him; it was a Libra-rising surface he learned to operate, with effort, over a Scorpio Moon that was permanently uncomfortable.

That reframing matters because the public Ferguson — the cheery Scotsman who pulled out a globe and a gay robot skeleton on network television — read like a man for whom warmth came easily. The chart says the opposite. It says the warmth was real but expensive, that the discipline was the foundation under everything, and that the public would never see most of what holding the structure cost. What the chart asks you to reckon with is that some of the people we read as effortless are running an enormous amount of internal machinery to look that way — and that machinery, not the surface, is what is worth admiring. <a href="/celebrities/james-mcavoy">James McAvoy's Taurus chart</a> shows a similar 8th-house Sun running through different placements; the lesson repeats in different keys. The Taurus Sun does not promise ease. It promises a long arc through hard material, and a body that mostly keeps showing up.

Actor • 1983-05-05

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