January 5, 2003	Sunday	Ziqa’ad 1, 1423

LOS ANGELES, Jan 4: Sydney Omarr, who was known as “the astrologer to the stars” died on Thursday at a Santa Monica hospital, according to reports Friday. He was 76.

Omarr, who suffered from multiple sclerosis since 1971, kept writing his widely-read newspaper horoscopes until he suffered a heart attack on December 23rd. Assistants now intend to continue producing his horoscope, which is published in hundreds of newspapers, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Born Sidney Kimmelman on August 5, 1926, in Philadelphia, he was fascinated at an early age with astrology. He changed his name at the age of 15 in a bid to increase the chances of success of his first book “Sydney Omarr’s Private Course on Numerology.” He also started analyzing the horoscopes of movie stars such as Edward G. Robinson for magazines.

“When I started out, it was, ‘Send me a dollar and a birth date and I’ll solve any problem,’” he recalled earlier this year in a Los Angeles Times interview. “My father, Harry, a grocer, and mother, Rose, a housewife, stopped worrying about me when the checks started coming in.”—dpa