Astrologer will forecast the future from beyond the grave
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Your support makes all the difference.Sydney Omarr, an astrologer to the stars whose syndicated horoscopes were perhaps the most widely read in the world, has died in California. Despite this, his foresight and divining of the future is set to continue.
Shortly after Omarr died on Thursday, aged 76, his assistants started making arrangements to ensure that his column – syndicated to more than 200 daily newspapers – would continue to be produced under his name. His fans will be hoping that Omarr will be able to reveal his predictive skills from beyond the grave.
Omarr was blind and paralysed from the neck down as a result of multiple sclerosis, diagnosed in 1971, but he continued working until a heart attack two days before Christmas left him critically ill.
Famous for giving readings to film stars such as Edward G Robinson, Omarrwas born Sidney Kimmelman, but changed his name when he was 15. Inspired by a character played by Victor Mature in the film Shanghai Gesture, he took the name Omar and added an additional "r" in accordance with various numerological formulae he claimed to follow. His obsessions with numerology grew. While a teenager, he wrote a book called Sydney Omarr's Private Course on Numerology, which he sold for $2 a copy.
"When I started out it was 'Send me a dollar and a birth date and I'll solve any problem'," he once recalled. "My father, Harry, a grocer, and mother, Rose, a housewife, stopped worrying me when the cheques started coming in."
His big break in the forward-looking world of prediction came when he enlisted in the US army at the age of 17. He was sent to the Japanese island of Okinawa where he hosted a weekly Armed Forces Radio programme called Sydney Omarr's Almanac, which sought to predict the outcome of professional boxing matches and horse races.
He later trained as a journalist, working for the United Press and CBS Radio. But it was in horoscopes that his future lay. He wrote a total of 13 books – one for each of the 12 signs of the zodiac and one for the entire year. They have sold more than 50 million copies in the United States alone.
Predicting the future was something he took seriously. Despite this, he believed in having fun. Gambling was one of his main hobbies, and he claimed to know which way the cards would fall. "I win more than I lose," he insisted during one recent interview.
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