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Steve McQueen
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Terrence Steven "Steve" McQueen (March 24, 1930 – November 7, 1980) was an American movie actor nicknamed "The King of Cool." His "anti-hero" persona, which he developed at the height of the Vietnam counterculture, made him one of the top box-office draws of the 1960s and 1970s. After appearing in the 1974 film The Towering Inferno, he became the highest paid movie star in the world. Although McQueen was combative with directors and producers, his popularity put him in high demand and enabled him to command large salaries.
He was an avid racer of both motorcycles and cars.
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Terrence Steven "Steve" McQueen (March 24, 1930 – November 7, 1980) was an American movie actor nicknamed "The King of Cool." His "anti-hero" persona, which he developed at the height of the Vietnam counterculture, made him one of the top box-office draws of the 1960s and 1970s. After appearing in the 1974 film The Towering Inferno, he became the highest paid movie star in the world. Although McQueen was combative with directors and producers, his popularity put him in high demand and enabled him to command large salaries.
He was an avid racer of both motorcycles and cars. While he studied acting, he supported himself partly by competing in weekend motorcycle races and bought his first motorcycle with his winnings. He is recognized for performing many of his own stunts, especially the majority of the stunt driving during the high-speed chase scene in Bullitt. Additionally, McQueen designed and patented a bucket seat for race cars.
Early life
McQueen was born Terrence Steven McQueen in Beech Grove, Indiana, a suburban community bordering Indianapolis, in Marion County. His father, William, a stunt pilot for a barnstorming flying circus, abandoned McQueen and his mother when McQueen was six months old. His mother, Julia, was a young, rebellious alcoholic. Unable to cope with bringing up a small child, she left him with her parents (Victor and Lillian) in Slater, Missouri, in 1933. Shortly thereafter, as the Great Depression set in, McQueen and his grandparents moved in with Lillian's brother Claude on the latter's farm in Slater.
McQueen had good memories of the time spent on his Great Uncle Claude's farm. In recalling Claude, McQueen stated "He was a very good man, very strong, very fair. I learned a lot from him." On McQueen's fourth birthday, Claude gave him a red tricycle, which McQueen later claimed started his interest in racing. At age 8, he was taken back by his mother and lived with her and her new husband in Indianapolis. McQueen retained a special memory of leaving the farm: "The day I left the farm Uncle Claude gave me a personal going-away present; a gold pocket watch, with an inscription inside the case." The inscription read: "To Steve-- who has been a son to me."
McQueen, who was dyslexic and partially deaf as a result of a childhood ear infection, did not adjust well to his new life. Within a couple of years he was running with a street gang and committing acts of petty crime. Unable to control McQueen's behavior, his mother sent him back to Slater again. A couple of years later, when McQueen was 12, Julia wrote to Claude asking that McQueen be returned to her once again, to live in her new home in Los Angeles, California. Julia, whose second marriage had ended in divorce, had married a third time.
This would begin an unsettled period in McQueen's life. By McQueen's own account, he and his new stepfather, "locked horns immediately." McQueen recounted him as "a prime son of a bitch", who was not averse to using his fists on both McQueen and his mother. As McQueen began to rebel once again, he was sent back to live with Claude a final time. At age 14, McQueen left Claude's farm without saying goodbye and joined a circus for a short time, after which he slowly drifted back to his mother and stepfather in Los Angeles, and resumed his life as a gang member and petty criminal. On one occasion, McQueen was caught stealing hubcaps by police who proceeded to hand him over to his stepfather. The latter proceeded to beat McQueen severely and ended the fight by throwing McQueen down a flight of stairs. McQueen looked up at his stepfather and said, "You lay your stinkin' hands on me again and I swear, I'll kill ya."
After this, McQueen's stepfather convinced Julia to sign a court order stating that McQueen was incorrigible and remanding him to the California Junior Boys Republic in Chino Hills, California. Here, McQueen slowly began to change and mature. He was not popular with the other boys at first: "Say the boys had a chance once a month to load into a bus and go into town to see a movie. And they lost out because one guy in the bungalow didn't get his work done right. Well, you can pretty well guess they're gonna have something to say about that. I paid his dues with the other fellows quite a few times. I got my lumps, no doubt about it. The other guys in the bungalow had ways of paying you back for interfering with their well-being." Ultimately, however, McQueen decided to give Boys Republic a fair shot. He became a role model for the other boys when he was elected to the Boys Council, a group who made the rules and regulations governing the boys' lives. (He would eventually leave Boys Republic at 16 and when he later became famous, he regularly returned to talk to the boys there. He also personally responded to every letter he received from the boys there, and retained a lifelong association.)
After McQueen left Chino, he returned to Julia, now living in Greenwich Village, but almost immediately left again. He then met two sailors from the Merchant Marine and volunteered to serve on a ship bound for the Dominican Republic. Once there, he abandoned his new post, eventually making his way to Texas, and drifted from job to job. He worked as a towel boy in a brothel, on an oil rigger, as a trinket salesman in a carnival and as a lumberjack.
Military service
In 1947, McQueen joined the United States Marine Corps and was quickly promoted to Private First Class and assigned to an armored unit. Initially, he reverted to his prior rebelliousness, and as a result was demoted to Private on seven different occasions. Additionally, he went AWOL by failing to return after a weekend pass had expired. He instead stayed away with a girlfriend for two weeks, until the shore patrol caught him. He responded to his captors by resisting them and as a result spent 41 days in the brig.
After this, McQueen resolved to focus his energies on self-improvement and embraced the Marines' discipline. He saved the lives of 5 other Marines during an Arctic exercise, pulling them from a tank before it broke through ice into the sea. He was also assigned to an honor guard responsible for guarding then-US President Harry Truman's yacht. McQueen served until 1950 when he was honorably discharged.
Acting career
In 1952, with financial assistance provided by the G.I. Bill, McQueen began studying acting at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. He also began to earn money by competing in weekend motorcycle races at Long Island City Raceway and soon purchased the first of many motorcycles, a used Harley Davidson. He soon became an excellent racer, and came home each weekend with about $100 in winnings.
After several roles in productions including Peg o' My Heart, The Member of the Wedding, and Two Fingers of Pride, McQueen landed his first film role in Somebody Up There Likes Me, directed by Robert Wise and starring Paul Newman. He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in the play A Hatful of Rain, starring Ben Gazzara. When McQueen appeared in a two-part television presentation entitled The Defenders, Hollywood manager Hilly Elkins (who managed McQueen's first wife, Neile) took note of him and decided that B-movies would be a good place for the young actor to make his mark. McQueen was subsequently hired to appear in the films Never Love a Stranger, The Blob, and The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery.
McQueen's first breakout role would not come in film, but on TV. Elkins successfully lobbied Vincent M. Fennelly, producer of the Western series Trackdown, to have McQueen read for the part of a bounty hunter named Josh Randall in a new pilot for a Trackdown companion series. The Josh Randall character, played by Robert Culp, was introduced in an episode of Trackdown, after which McQueen filmed the pilot episode. The pilot was approved for a new series now titled Wanted: Dead or Alive, on CBS, in September 1958.
McQueen would ultimately make this role his own and become a household name as a result. Randall's holster held a sawed-off Winchester rifle nicknamed the "Mare's Leg" instead of the standard six-gun carried by the typical Western character. This added to the anti-hero image of an offbeat-looking hero infused with a mixture of mystery, alienation, and detachment that made this show stand out from the typical TV Western. Ninety-four episodes, filmed at Apacheland Studio from 1958 until early 1961, kept McQueen steadily employed in television.
At 29, McQueen got his most significant break when Frank Sinatra removed Sammy Davis, Jr. from the film Never So Few, and Davis' role went to McQueen. Sinatra saw something special in McQueen and ensured that the young actor got plenty of good shots and close-ups in a role that earned McQueen favorable reviews. McQueen's character, "Bill Ringa", like the characters he would come to play, brought a new kind of "cool" to the screen and was never more comfortable than when driving at high speed — in this case at the wheel of a jeep. John Sturges directed this film and then used McQueen in The Magnificent Seven a year later and as the lead in The Great Escape in 1963.
After Never So Few, director John Sturges cast McQueen in his next movie, promising to "give him the camera." The Magnificent Seven (1960), with Yul Brynner, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson and James Coburn, became McQueen's first major hit, and led to his withdrawal from his own successful television series, Wanted: Dead or Alive. McQueen's focused portrayal of the taciturn second lead catapulted his career.
McQueen's next big film, 1963's The Great Escape, told the true story of an historical mass escape from a World War II POW camp. Insurance concerns prevented McQueen from performing the film's widely noted motorcycle leap, which was instead done by his friend and fellow cycle enthusiast Bud Ekins who resembled McQueen from a distance. When Johnny Carson later tried to congratulate McQueen for the jump during a broadcast of The Tonight Show, McQueen said, "It wasn't me. That was Bud Ekins." It was this film that established McQueen's box-office clout.
In 1963, McQueen starred with Natalie Wood in Love With The Proper Stranger. In 1966 McQueen appeared in a prequel as the titular Nevada Smith, a character from Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers who had been portrayed by Alan Ladd two years earlier in a movie version of the novel. McQueen also earned his only Academy Award nomination in 1966 for his role as a ship's mechanic in the film The Sand Pebbles.
He followed his Oscar nomination with another successful film, 1968's Bullitt, which is perhaps his most famous film featured an unprecedented (and endlessly imitated) auto chase through San Francisco. McQueen did all his own stunt driving with the exception of the Chestnut Street flying jumps (with Bud Ekins again doubling McQueen) and the gas-station crash gag (Carey Loftin doubling McQueen).
McQueen starred in The Thomas Crown Affair with Faye Dunaway in 1968 as well as The Reivers in 1969. McQueen also appeared in the 1971 car race drama Le Mans. He starred in The Getaway with future wife Ali MacGraw and played the leading role in Junior Bonner in 1972, and in 1973's Papillon.
By the time of The Getaway, McQueen was the world's highest paid actor. After 1974's The Towering Inferno, co-starring with his long-time personal friend and professional rival Paul Newman and reuniting him with Faye Dunaway, McQueen did not return to film until 1978 with An Enemy of the People playing against type as a heavily-bearded, bespectacled doctor, in this adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play. The film was little seen. His last films were Tom Horn and The Hunter, both released in 1980.
Missed roles
McQueen was offered the lead role in Breakfast at Tiffany's but was unable to accept due to his Wanted: Dead or Alive contract (the role went to George Peppard). He also turned down Ocean's Eleven, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (his attorneys and agents couldn't agree with Paul Newman's attorneys and agents on who got top billing), The Driver, Apocalypse Now, California Split, and Dirty Harry and The French Connection (McQueen didn't want to do another cop film).
He was also the first choice for director Steven Spielberg for his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. According to Spielberg on a documentary on the Close Encounters DVD, Spielberg met McQueen at a bar, where McQueen drank beer after beer. Before leaving the bar, McQueen told Spielberg that he could not accept the role because he was unable to cry on film. The role eventually went to Richard Dreyfuss.
McQueen expressed interest in starring in First Blood when David Morrell's novel appeared in 1972, but the producers eventually rejected him because of his age. He was offered the title role in The Bodyguard (opposite Diana Ross) when it was first proposed in 1976, but the film didn't reach production until years after McQueen's death. Quigley Down Under was in development as early as 1974, and both McQueen and Clint Eastwood were considered for the lead, but by the time production began in 1980, McQueen was too ill and the project was scrapped until a decade later, when Tom Selleck played the starring role.
Motor racing
McQueen was an avid motorcycle and racecar enthusiast. When he had the opportunity to drive in a movie, he often did so himself, performing many of his own stunts.
Perhaps the most memorable were the classic chase in Bullitt and the motorcycle chase scene in The Great Escape. Although the jump over the fence in The Great Escape was actually done by Bud Ekins for insurance purposes, McQueen did have a considerable amount of screen time riding his motorcycle. According to the commentary track on The Great Escape DVD, it was difficult to find riders as skilled as McQueen and at one point in the film, due to clever editing, McQueen is seen in a German uniform chasing himself on another bike.
Together with John Sturges, McQueen planned to make Day of the Champion, a movie about Formula One racing. He was busy with the delayed The Sand Pebbles, though. They had a contract with the German Nürburgring, and after John Frankenheimer shot scenes there for Grand Prix, the reels had to be turned over to Sturges. Frankenheimer was ahead in schedule anyway, and the McQueen/Sturges project was called off.
During his acting career, McQueen considered becoming a professional race car driver. In the 1970 12 Hours of Sebring race, Peter Revson and McQueen (driving with a cast on his left foot from a motorcycle accident two weeks before) won with a Porsche 908/02 in the 3 litre class and missed winning overall by a scant 23 seconds to Mario Andretti/Ignazio Giunti/Nino Vaccarella in a 5 litre Ferrari 512S. The same Porsche 908 was entered by his production company Solar Productions as a camera car for Le Mans in the 1970 24 Hours of Le Mans later that year. McQueen wanted to drive a Porsche 917 with Jackie Stewart in that race, but his film backers threatened to pull their support if he drove. Faced with the choice of driving for 24 hours in the race or driving the entire summer making the film, McQueen opted to do the latter. However, the film was a box office flop that almost ruined McQueen's career. In addition, McQueen himself admitted that he almost died while filming the movie. Nonetheless, today, Le Mans is considered to be the most historically realistic, accurate, and dramatic representation of one of the most famous periods in the history of the race, as well as being considered one of the greatest auto racing movies of all time.
McQueen also competed in off-road motorcycle racing. His first off-road motorcycle was a Triumph 500cc that he purchased from friend and stunt man Bud Ekins. McQueen raced in many of the top off-road races on the West Coast during the '60s and early 1970s, including the Baja 1000, the Mint 400 and the Elsinore Grand Prix. In 1964, he represented the United States in the International Six Days Trial, a form of off-road motorcycling Olympics. He was inducted in the Off-road Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1978. In 1971, Solar Productions funded the now-classic motorcycle documentary On Any Sunday, in which McQueen himself is featured, along with racing legends Mert Lawwill and Malcolm Smith. Also in 1971, McQueen was on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine riding a Husqvarna dirt bike.
McQueen was interested in collecting classic motorcycles. By the time of his death, his collection included over 100 motorcycles and was valued in the millions of dollars.
In a segment filmed for The Ed Sullivan Show, McQueen drove Sullivan around a desert area in a dune buggy at high speed. At the end of the trip, all the breathless Sullivan could say was, "That was a helluva ride!"
He owned several exotic sports cars, including:
To his dismay, McQueen was never able to own the legendary Ford Mustang GT that he drove in Bullitt, which featured a highly-modified drivetrain that suited McQueen's driving style. There were two cars used for filming. According to the October 2006 issue of Motor Trend Classic, in its cover story on the film, one of the cars was so badly damaged during filming it was judged to be unrepairable, and scrapped. The second car still exists, but the owner has consistently refused to sell it at any price. The owner plans a "minimal restoration" to make the car roadworthy, yet still retain the original patina.
Personal life
McQueen's height is disputed. He was officially listed as 5'10", but some people, including film critic Barry Norman, have said McQueen's height was in fact only 5'7". He had a daily two-hour exercise regimen, involving weightlifting and at one point running five miles, seven days a week. McQueen also learned the martial art Tang Soo Do from ninth degree black belt Pat E. Johnson. However, he was also known for his prolific drug use (William Claxton claimed he smoked marijuana almost every day; others said he used a tremendous amount of cocaine in the early 1970s). In addition, like many actors of his era, he was a heavy cigarette smoker.
McQueen served as one of the pallbearers at Bruce Lee's funeral in 1973. Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee taught McQueen's son Chad Taekwondo and Jeet Kune Do, (respectively). Later on, McQueen persuaded Norris to attend acting classes.
After Charles Manson incited the murder of five people, including McQueen's close friends Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, at Tate's home on August 9, 1969, it was reported that McQueen was another potential target of the killers. According to his first wife, McQueen then began carrying a handgun at all times in public, including at Sebring's funeral.
McQueen had an unusual reputation for demanding free items in bulk from studios when agreeing to do a film, such as electric razors, jeans and several other products. It was later found out that McQueen requested these things because he was donating them to the Boy's Republic reformatory school for displaced youth, where he had spent time during his teen years. McQueen made occasional visits to the school to spend time with the students, often to play pool and to speak with them about his experiences.
After discovering a mutual interest in racing, McQueen and his Great Escape co-star James Garner became good friends. Garner lived directly down the hill from McQueen and, as McQueen recalled, "I could see that Jim was very neat around his place. Flowers trimmed, no papers in the yard ... grass always cut. So, just to piss him off, I'd start lobbing empty beer cans down the hill into his driveway. He'd have his drive all spic 'n' span when he left the house, then get home to find all these empty cans. Took him a long time to figure out it was me".
McQueen was conservative in his political views and often backed the Republican Party. He supported the Vietnam War, was one of the few Hollywood stars who refused numerous requests to back Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy, in 1968, and turned down the chance to participate in the 1963 March on Washington. When McQueen heard a rumor that he had been added to Nixon's Enemies List, he responded by immediately flying a giant American flag outside his house. Reportedly, his wife Ali McGraw responded to the whole affair by saying, "But you're the most patriotic person I know."
McQueen commanded such celebrity status in the United Kingdom that when visiting Chelsea Football Club to watch a match, he was personally introduced to the players in the dressing room during the half-time break.
Barbara Minty McQueen in her book, Steve McQueen: The Last Mile, writes of McQueen becoming an Evangelical Christian toward the end of his life. This was due in part to the influences of his flying instructor, Sammy Mason and his son Pete, and Barbara. McQueen attended his local church, Ventura Missionary Church, and was visited by evangelist Billy Graham shortly before his death.
Hobbies
- Was an avid dirt bike rider. (see BSA Hornet)
- Was to co-drive in a Triumph 2500 PI for the British Leyland team in the 1970 London-Mexico rally, but had to turn it down due to movie commitments.
- Owned and flew a 1931 Pitcairn PA-8 biplane, once flown as part of the U.S. Mail Service by famed World War I flying ace, Eddie Rickenbacker. It was hangared at Santa Paula Airport an hour northwest of Hollywood.
Marriages
McQueen was married three times. He married Manila-born actress Neile Adams on November 2, 1956 (divorced 1972), by whom he had a daughter, Terry (born June 5, 1959; died at 38 on March 19, 1998 as a result of hemochromatosis, a condition in which the body produces too much iron destroying the liver), and a son, Chad McQueen (born December 28, 1960 and now an actor—as is his grandson, Steven R. McQueen, born 1988). McQueen has 3 other grandchildren: Chase (born in 1995) and Madison (born in 1997) to Chad; and Molly Flattery (born 1987) to Terry.
On August 31, 1973 he married his Getaway co-star, Ali MacGraw, with whom he had a passionate but tumultuous relationship (she left her husband, film producer Robert Evans, for McQueen). They were divorced in 1978. His third wife was model Barbara Minty, whom he married on January 16, 1980, less than a year before his death.
Death
McQueen died at the age of 50 in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, following an operation to remove or reduce several metastatic tumors in his abdomen. He had been diagnosed with mesothelioma (a type of cancer associated with asbestos exposure), in December 1979, and had traveled to Playas de Rosarito, Baja California, in July 1980, for unconventional treatment after U.S. doctors advised him that they could do nothing to prolong his life. Controversy arose over McQueen's Mexican trip, because McQueen sought a very non-traditional treatment that used coffee enemas, frequent shampoos, injection of live cells from cows and sheep, massage and laetrile, a supposedly "natural" anti-cancer drug available in Mexico, but not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. McQueen was treated by William Donald Kelley, whose only medical license had been (until it was revoked in 1976) for orthodontistry. Kelley's methods created a sensation in both the traditional and tabloid press when it became known that McQueen was a patient. Despite metastasis of the cancer to much of McQueen's body, Kelley publicly announced that McQueen would be completely cured and return to normal life. However, McQueen's condition worsened and "huge" tumors developed in his abdomen. In late October 1980, McQueen flew to Ciudad Juárez to have the five-pound abdominal tumors removed, despite the warnings of his U.S. doctors that the tumor was inoperable and that his heart would not withstand the surgery. McQueen died of cardiac arrest one day after the operation. Shortly before his death, McQueen had given a medical interview in which he blamed his condition on asbestos exposure. While McQueen felt that asbestos used in movie soundstage insulation and race-drivers' protective suits and helmets could have been involved, he believed his illness was a direct result of massive exposure while removing asbestos lagging from pipes aboard a troop ship during his time in the Marines.
A memorial service was presided over by Leonard DeWitt of the Ventura Missionary Church. McQueen was cremated, and his ashes spread in the Pacific Ocean.
Posthumously, McQueen remains one of the most popular stars, and his estate limits the licensing of his image to avoid the commercial saturation experienced by some other deceased celebrities. McQueen's personality and trademark rights are managed by GreenLight, LLC, A Corbis Company. In 1999, McQueen was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame.
Memorabilia
The blue tinted sunglasses (Persol 714) worn by McQueen in the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair sold at a Bonhams & Butterfields auction in Los Angeles for $70,200 in 2006. One of his motorcycles, a 1937 Crocker, sold for a world-record price of $276,500 at the same auction. McQueen's 1963 metallic-brown Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Lusso sold for $2.31 million USD at auction on August 16, 2007.
The Rolex Explorer 2 Reference 1655, is also now so-called Rolex Steve McQueen in the horology collectors world.
Filmography
Awards
Academy Awards
Golden Globe Awards
See also
Further reading
External links
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- Retrieved on 2008-04-02
- The Online Resource for Steve McQueen Fans
- - at the BBC
- at American Movie Classics
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