Cary Grant’s BaZi: Xin Metal Soaked in Winter Water, and a Voyage Across the Atlantic

Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach to a poor family in Bristol, England. His chart is Gui-Mao, Yi-Chou, Xin-Hai, Wu-Zi (癸卯 乙丑 辛亥 戊子): Xin Metal, the fine metal of jewelry, born in deep winter, with the branches Hai, Zi and Chou forming a complete Water combination that drains the Metal dry. Our engine reads him as weak; Wealth is unfavorable, and in Zi Wei Dou Shu his Wealth Palace is empty too. At 16 he went to America on tour with an acrobatic troupe, stayed, and became Hollywood’s definitive gentleman. His luck pillars have an unusual shape: twenty years entirely unfavorable, then from age 33 fifty straight years entirely favorable.

Birth data: a birth record, and his own account agrees

Bristol lies 2.6 degrees west of Greenwich, which takes about ten minutes off the clock, and the equation of time in mid-January takes off roughly ten more. That gives 0:46, moving him back from the Chou hour on the clock into the Zi hour. The Zi hour begins at 23:00 the day before, but 0:46 is already past midnight, so the day pillar is not affected. (BaZi uses true solar time, the time shown by the sun at the birthplace, rather than clock time.)

Four Pillars and Ten Gods

Our strength engine scores season, roots, visible stems, Resource and companions against Wealth, Officer and Output: below 0.35 reads weak, above 0.55 reads strong.

A score of 0.295: weak. The problem is not being attacked but being drained: a whole sea of winter Water carries the Metal’s strength away, and Wood wears it down from the side. The chart favors Earth (Resource) to feed him, Metal (companions) to help him, and Fire (Officer) to warm the chart; it does not want more Water (Output) or Wood (Wealth). On climate (tiao hou), the winter Water combination is as cold as it gets, and our engine flags it as “cold, short of Fire; needs Fire to warm the chart.”

People whose Output forms a full combination show their talent openly and know how to perform, but when the Day Master is weak, that talent becomes a drain. As a boy he learned acrobatics, stilt-walking and gags on the street and in the theater, and his gift for performing showed early. Yet this chart’s strength was always flowing outward, and until he found his footing it would be hard to call it a lucky chart.

Before and after emigrating: twenty years all unfavorable, fifty years all favorable

For a man born in a yin year (the year stem Gui is yin), the luck pillars run backwards, starting at age 4.

“fav / unfav” reads the stem first, then the branch: whether each one’s element is favorable (useful), unfavorable, or neither (neutral) for this chart.

The first two luck pillars, Jia-Zi, Gui-Hai, are Water and Wood in both stem and branch, exactly what this chart fears most: more Water and stronger Wood. In those twenty years he lost his mother’s presence, was expelled from school, crossed the ocean with a troupe and lived in cheap rooms in New York. It was a genuinely unfavorable stretch.

From 1937, the five luck pillars Xin-You, Geng-Shen, Ji-Wei, Wu-Wu, Ding-Si are favorable in both stem and branch: Metal to help him, Earth to feed him, Fire to warm the chart. Those fifty years cover his whole golden age, from top-billed star to retirement and a lifetime achievement Oscar.

King Charles III in this series also walked fifty straight years of favorable luck, but he spent them waiting for the throne; Winston Churchill’s one fully favorable decade was his bleakest, the “wilderness years”. The same favorable luck lines up with the peak of Grant’s life. We list all three because picking only the cases that fit is not reading charts.

A few key years

The year he left England (1918, Wu-Wu), the year he reached America (1920, Geng-Shen) and the year he signed and changed his name (1931, Xin-Wei) are favorable in both stem and branch, all three of them: Fire to warm, Earth to feed, Metal to help. It is rare in this series for the three biggest turning points of a life to fall in fully favorable years. We lay these out and go no further.

Change your place, change your fate?

Grant is the second person in this series’ “moved abroad to make it” group. In Bristol, home, school and family all went badly; in America, everything went up. Our position is the same as on the Arnold Schwarzenegger page: a BaZi chart records the moment of birth, and moving house does not change it. The more defensible reading is that his luck was already due to turn favorable around 1937, and just before that he had put himself inside the biggest film industry in the world. The timing is in the chart; the stage is not.

Where does the chart miss his real life?

Zi Wei Dou Shu chart

The same birth time, cast in Zi Wei Dou Shu (San He school, the same engine as our Zi Wei chart tool, using the same true solar time as the BaZi chart above). BaZi weighs the five elements and what the chart favors; Zi Wei looks at which stars fall in which palace. The two systems ask different questions, so the Zi Wei chart is shown on its own first, followed by where it agrees and disagrees with the BaZi reading.

The gold frame is the Life Palace; the shaded palaces are its three-sides-and-four-directions (Wealth, Career, Travel). Solid badges are the birth-year transformations (Lu, Quan, Ke, Ji), red names are the six malefic stars, and the small word after a major star is its brightness.

Grant’s Zi Wei chart at his birthplace has Tai Yang and Tai Yin together in the Life Palace (in the Chou palace), with the Body Palace in the same place and Tai Yin carrying the Ke transformation. With Sun and Moon sharing the Chou palace, the Sun is dim while the Moon is brilliant; the old texts read this pairing as gentle, reserved and emotionally changeable, and Tai Yin Ke brings a good name and a good image. The Wealth Palace and the Travel Palace are both empty, and Tian Liang in the Career Palace is fallen, so the Life, Wealth and Career palaces are weak overall. On screen he was the picture of easy elegance, yet in private he admitted more than once that he had spent his life playing a character called “Cary Grant”. That fits, at least somewhat, the reading of a Sun and Moon sharing one palace, one bright and one dark.

With the other birth-time versions, the Zi Wei chart becomes:

In BaZi the hour pillar changes every two hours while the day pillar and above stay put. In Zi Wei the Life Palace is set by the lunar month and the hour, so a different hour moves the Life Palace, the Body Palace, the bureau and every major star at once. The same dispute over a birth hour therefore usually matters more for Zi Wei than for BaZi.

Now try the popular online idea that “if you move, recast the chart in local time”. Convert his moment of birth to Los Angeles time and it becomes early evening of the previous day, the You hour. The Zi Wei chart then turns into Qi Sha (brilliant) in the Life Palace, Tan Lang with Lu Cun in the Wealth Palace, and Po Jun with the Lu transformation in the Career Palace: a complete Sha-Po-Lang (Qi Sha, Po Jun, Tan Lang) pattern, with Lian Zhen and Tian Fu still in the opposite Travel Palace. It looks far more like a boy who crossed the ocean with a touring troupe at 16 and made his own way. But he was born in Bristol, and Los Angeles clock time is only another way of writing the same instant. This is picking a chart after you already know the outcome. It is hindsight, and purely for entertainment.

For school, leap-month and Zi-hour settings see the Zi Wei chart page; for how the two systems differ see BaZi vs Zi Wei Dou Shu. The hindsight warning applies here too: once you know the outcome, any star can be made to explain it.

Western astrology chart

The same moment of birth, cast as a Western natal chart (tropical zodiac, Placidus houses, the same engine as our natal chart tool). A natal chart uses the sky at the moment of birth, so it needs no true-solar-time correction, but it does need the latitude of the birthplace to fix the Ascendant and the houses. BaZi and Zi Wei are both derived from the Chinese calendar, while a natal chart computes planetary positions directly. Because the three systems start from different places, the chart is listed on its own below, followed by where it agrees with the BaZi and Zi Wei readings.

A Libra Ascendant: graceful, measured, instantly easy to be around. That is almost the definition of the screen persona called “Cary Grant”. The Capricorn Sun and Aquarius Moon both sit in the 3rd house, the house of communication, which suits an actor famous for quick-witted dialogue and comic timing. A Capricorn Sun is also about discipline and the climb upward: he came from a poor family in Bristol, ran off with an acrobatic troupe in his teens, and built himself step by step into Hollywood’s gentleman. That kind of carefully constructed elegance is exactly what a Capricorn Sun with a Libra Ascendant describes. Where it does not fit should be said up front: the Ascendant is at 28° Libra, and a birth only 10 minutes later would give a Scorpio Ascendant and a completely different temperament. BaZi reads him as weak Xin Metal with twenty unfavorable years at the start, which points the same way as the Capricorn story of a late starter who gets better with age.

Domicile, exaltation, fall and detriment in brackets are the classical categories for how comfortably a planet works in a sign; they are not verdicts of good or bad. For how to read the big three, the ten planets and aspects, see rising sign, Moon sign, the ten planets and aspects. The hindsight warning applies here too: once you know the outcome, any sign can be made to explain it.

When does your luck turn?

The four pillars, strength score and luck pillars on this page all come from the same engine as the chart on our home page. Enter your birth date to see whether each of your luck pillars is favorable or unfavorable, and at what age the turns come. You can also read the other people in this series who made it after moving abroad: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn and Rudolph Valentino.