"If I hadn't made it as an actor, I might have wound up as a hood."
- Steve McQueen

If Steve McQueen were alive, he would now be 80. Perhaps his persona would have mellowed with age, like that of Clint Eastwood (also 80), or maybe he'd be playing a crusty older version of his rebellious loner character. We'll never know, of course, but what can be said is that when Steve McQueen died in 1980, movie audiences lost one of the most laconic and electrifying, not to mention coolest, actors of a generation. McQueen's screen presence was so intense that he was rarely upstaged by other actors. There's a reason that when most people think of The Magnificent Seven (1960) or The Great Escape (1963), it is McQueen that comes to mind right away - despite the ensemble casts.

Born Terence Steven McQueen in Beech Grove, Indiana on March 24, 1930, the actor's childhood was filled with chaos. His father abandoned the family before McQueen was 6 months old, never to be heard from again. Not long after, his alcoholic mother abandoned him as well, leaving her son in the care of a great uncle who raised him on a Missouri farm. At the age of 9, he rejoined his mother in Los Angeles but eventually drifted into delinquency. Arrested for stealing hubcaps, he spent 18 months at a boys' reform school in Chino. Years later, McQueen called this "a good experience that straightened me out," and he donated money and clothing to the facility on a regular basis.

After reform school, McQueen ran away and took odd jobs, including stints as a lumberjack, a sailor, and an oil field worker. He joined the Marines at 17, where he worked as a tank driver and mechanic, spurring a lifelong interest in vehicles - especially motorcycles. Though he spent six weeks under military arrest for going AWOL, he also received a commendation for rescuing five Marines in a training accident. Eventually, he moved to New York and took more odd jobs like bouncer, bartender, and TV repairman, before a girlfriend suggested he try his hand at acting. A tryout at the Neighborhood Playhouse led to a stint at Lee Strasberg's Acting Studio and a stage career, and in 1956, McQueen replaced Ben Gazzara in the Broadway production of A Hatful of Rain.

After McQueen relocated to Hollywood, things moved quickly. Bit parts led to the classic sci-fi feature The Blob (1958) (in which he turned in the film's most natural performance), and more significantly, the role of Josh Randall on the CBS series Wanted: Dead or Alive. It was this role that caught the eye of director John Sturges, who subsequently cast him in the scene-stealing part of a cheeky soldier in Never So Few (1959), a WWII film that starred Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford.

Sturges cast him in his next film as well, and in The Magnificent Seven, McQueen made an even bigger impression as a calculating yet wry gunfighter opposite Yul Brynner. His growing, rebellious reputation off screen perfectly matched this solidifying screen image. After memorable stints in the comic The Honeymoon Machine (1961) and the intense combat drama Hell is For Heroes (1962) (one of his most underrated films), Sturges cast him a third time in the film that finally made him a superstar: The Great Escape. As the memorable "Cooler King," McQueen radiated pure charisma, and he performed many of his own motorcycle stunts.

One of the few times McQueen was ever upstaged on screen came in The Cincinnati Kid (1965), in which he played a poker player who meets his match in Edward G. Robinson. Nevertheless, it continued a string of unqualified commercial successes. McQueen went on to the western Nevada Smith (1966), the flashy heist thriller The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), in which he was cast against type as an elegant, educated businessman thief, and the unforgettable Bullitt (1968), with its spectacular car chase. He also scored his only Oscar® nomination for The Sand Pebbles (1966).

By all accounts, McQueen threw his weight around on a set. He was a terror to directors - demanding, abrasive, and threatening. Norman Jewison, who directed him in The Cincinnati Kid and The Thomas Crown Affair, called him "the most difficult actor I ever worked with." But on screen, he was electric. "He exuded danger," said his second wife Ali MacGraw, whom he famously stole away from producer Robert Evans while filming The Getaway (1972). Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in that film as well as in Junior Bonner (1972), said simply, "If you really want to learn about acting, watch Steve's eyes in close-up."

But McQueen had mixed feelings about the acting profession, especially compared to his true passion, car racing. "An actor is a puppet," he once said, "manipulated by a dozen other people. Auto racing has dignity." McQueen built up a huge collection of vehicles throughout his life; when he died, he had amassed 210 motorcycles, 55 cars, and 5 airplanes. But he did more than just collect, taking time off from acting to race cars and motorcycles professionally. He won several races, but off the track his recklessness led to his involvement in over two dozen accidents. In an effort to be seen by the public as a serious racer, he financed Bruce Brown's 1971 documentary On Any Sunday for $300,000 - in exchange for his appearance in the film. But the documentary failed to reach a large audience.

After the ensuing success of Papillon (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974), McQueen tried to land more intellectual pictures and he turned down many offers (including Apocalypse Now, 1979), struggling for years to make his pet project, an adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1978). An impressive effort in which McQueen was almost unrecognizable as the heavily bearded doctor fighting hypocrisy, the film (with a screenplay by Arthur Miller) went virtually unrecognized and unseen, though it showed the more serious direction McQueen's career was starting to take. Tom Horn (1980), a Western he was legally obliged to make, followed, and his final film, The Hunter (1980), was produced while the actor was already ill.

He had contracted mesothelioma, a rare and painful form of lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. When conventional treatments failed, he traveled to Mexico in search of experimental cures. He died in a clinic there, at the age of 50.

by Jeremy Arnold