The Full Biography
Steve McQueen. Actor. Beech Grove and the open road. The man they called the King of Cool, who made stillness look like speed and died looking for a cure in Juárez.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a green Mustang dropping down a San Francisco hill, or a man in a sweatshirt on a motorcycle aimed at a Swiss wire, or a half-smile that does not ask whether you like it. The year might be 1963 or 1968. The face is already a trademark. What the still cannot show is Terrence Stephen McQueen of Beech Grove, Indiana, a boy who lived in a reform school and a Marine brig, a racer who treated a film set as another kind of track, and a sick man whose last released picture was The Hunter.
He was born on March 24, 1930, in Beech Grove, just outside Indianapolis. His father, William McQueen, a stunt pilot, left before the boy could make a memory of him. His mother, Julia, was young and not built for a single household. The child was sent to Slater, Missouri, to live with an uncle, Claude, on a farm — the first place that asked him to work and the first place that felt like a rule he could stand. When he was taken back into his mother’s weather, the weather included a stepfather and the street. At fourteen he drifted. At sixteen he was at Boys Republic, a reform school in Chino, California. He would send the school money for the rest of his life. The first pressure was not a camera. It was how to become a person no one could send away again.
In 1947 he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was seventeen. He spent time in the brig for going absent; he also pulled other Marines out of a harbor accident and left the service, in 1950, with an honorable discharge and a body that knew discipline even when the mind refused it. New York came next: Greenwich Village, odd jobs, the Neighborhood Playhouse, Sanford Meisner’s classes. He learned to act by not indicating. Meisner’s gospel — live truthfully under imaginary circumstances — fit a young man who already distrusted decoration. He worked. He took television. He took a Broadway replacement job in A Hatful of Rain. Hollywood, which was looking for a new kind of man, found a face that did not sell eagerness.
The door was a CBS western. Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958–1961) made him Josh Randall, a bounty hunter with a sawed-off Winchester on his belt. The show was a hit. The movies began to use him. Never So Few (1959). The War Lover (1962). Hell Is for Heroes (1962), a lean war picture that already knew what to do with his refusal to chatter. Then The Magnificent Seven (1960), John Sturges’s western from Kurosawa, Yul Brynner in black, McQueen as Vin, a gunfighter who stole scenes by shaking shotgun shells and saying almost nothing. Brynner noticed. So did the public. Three years after the Seven, Sturges put him in The Great Escape (1963) as Hilts, the Cooler King, an American in a German POW camp who spends the picture trying to leave and the last reel on a motorcycle. The jump over the wire is the civic memory. He wanted to do more of the riding than the studio preferred. The appetite for machines was not a publicist’s invention. It was the life. Off the lot he raced motorcycles in the desert and cars at tracks that did not care about a one-sheet. He entered the 12 Hours of Sebring. He treated a Sunday at a track the way other stars treated a premiere: as the room where he was most himself.
What followed was a run. Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) opposite Natalie Wood. The Cincinnati Kid (1965), a poker picture that wanted to be The Hustler with cards. Nevada Smith (1966). Then The Sand Pebbles (1966), Robert Wise’s long China-station epic: a sailor, a gunboat, a war that will not stay off the deck. The Academy nominated him for Best Actor. It is the only competitive nomination. He did not win. He did not need the statue to set a price. By the end of the decade he was among the highest-paid film stars on earth, a fact he treated as leverage, not as a personality.
1968 is the double peak. The Thomas Crown Affair, for Norman Jewison, opposite Faye Dunaway: a Boston millionaire who steals from his own class, a chess game, a kiss cut into pieces, a glider. He is tailored, amused, dangerous without raising his voice. Bullitt, for Peter Yates, opposite Jacqueline Bisset: a San Francisco detective in a turtleneck, a case that stinks, and a car chase down the hills that reset what a chase could be. The Mustang and the Charger are the stars the public named. McQueen is the man who refuses to narrate what he is doing. The two pictures, in one year, made the King of Cool a job description.
He chased the machines between pictures and, sometimes, instead of them. Le Mans (1971) is a racing film he wanted so badly it became a production ordeal and a box-office disappointment; the footage of the cars is still the reason people watch it. Junior Bonner (1972), for Sam Peckinpah, is a rodeo picture about a man whose moment has already moved. The Getaway (1972), also Peckinpah, opposite Ali MacGraw, is a bank-robbery honeymoon that the columns treated as a real honeymoon. He had married Neile Adams in 1956; they had two children, Terry and Chad. That marriage ended. He married MacGraw in 1973. That marriage ended. The pattern is a man who could be still on camera and restless in a house.
Papillon (1973), from Henri Charrière, opposite Dustin Hoffman, put him on Devil’s Island as a man whose only job is not to die in a cage. It is perhaps the performance that asked the most of the stillness. The Towering Inferno (1974) put him opposite Paul Newman in a skyscraper fire and a billing fight the town still tells as folklore. He took the last fade-out and a firefighter’s role that let him work, again, with equipment. Then a long pause. He wanted different pictures. The industry wanted the Mustang. He made An Enemy of the People (1978), from Ibsen, a small film about a man who tells a town the water is poison. Almost no one went. He did not apologize for the attempt.
I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.Steve McQueen
The turn is not the motorcycle jump. The turn is the refusal, after the money and the nickname, to keep playing only the man in the turtleneck. Ibsen was a miss. The miss is part of the file. So is the racing. So is Boys Republic, which kept receiving checks from a former inmate who had become the face on the poster.
Six things most people never knew
- Boys Republic in Chino is the origin school. A reformatory. He sent it money for decades. The cool started as a boy nobody could house.
- The Marines gave him a brig and a discharge. 1947 to 1950. Discipline and refusal in the same enlistment.
- Wanted: Dead or Alive was the door, not The Magnificent Seven. Television taught the country the face. The westerns made it a monument.
- One Oscar nomination. The Sand Pebbles, 1966. The King of Cool is a box-office title, not an Academy one.
- He wanted Ibsen after the fire picture. An Enemy of the People. A miss. A serious one.
- The Hunter is the last released film. 1980. A bounty hunter again, twenty years after Josh Randall. Then Juárez.
He raced at a level that embarrassed the celebrity-lap category. The 1970 12 Hours of Sebring, in a Porsche 908 with Peter Revson, ended on the podium in a race that did not care about Bullitt. Le Mans the picture grew out of that appetite and nearly broke the production; the footage of the 917s is still why racing people forgive the plot. He collected bikes the way some men collect watches. He flew. He trusted a machine that he had prepared more than a room that had been prepared for him.
In 1980 he married Barbara Minty, a model, his third wife. He had already been told what was waiting. Doctors found mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lung, the kind the century associates with asbestos. Ships, racing suits, movie-set insulation — the biographies argue about the source. The disease did not argue. He made two last pictures while the body allowed it: Tom Horn (1980), a western about a man the frontier no longer needs, and The Hunter (1980), a modern bounty hunter, a last echo of Josh Randall. They are the work of a star who can still hold a frame and can no longer pretend the frame is the whole future.
The later years
The last year was a search. American medicine, as he met it, offered a clock and not much else. He went to Mexico, to clinics in Rosarito and then Ciudad Juárez, toward treatments the U.S. boards would not bless: laetrile, coffee enemas, the apparatus of last hope. Barbara went with him. The press, which had loved the Mustang, now loved the sickroom. He tried to work and then could not. Friends from the racing world and from the old pictures called. Some came. The King of Cool, in the photographs that leaked, was a thin man in a cap, still trying to manage the shot.
He had, in those months, the ranch in Santa Paula, the planes, the motorcycles, the collection of a man who had always trusted machines more than rooms. He had Terry and Chad, grown and not grown enough for this. He had the third marriage, new, asked to do the work of an ending. He had Boys Republic, still on the charity list. He flew when the doctors would allow it. He sat in a hangar and talked about a Stearman the way other dying men talk about a will. He did not issue a long public statement about dying. He had never issued long public statements about living. The stillness, at the end, was not a style. It was what he had left.
The last American workplaces were the Tom Horn set and the Hunter set: a frontier assassin the century had outgrown, and a bounty hunter who chases a man through Chicago and a cornfield. Both pictures have the air of a star using the last contract to stay in motion. He is heavier, slower, still able to hold a silence until the other actor breaks. People who saw him in those months describe a man who knew the nickname had become a box. He was trying, even sick, to work his way out of the box the way Hilts had tried to work his way out of the cooler. The clinic in Juárez was another escape attempt. It failed. The pictures did not.
He died on November 7, 1980, in Juárez, after surgery to remove a mass. He was fifty. The death certificate and the newspapers said cardiac arrest following the operation; the disease underneath was the mesothelioma. The body came home. The funeral was not a studio event. Santa Paula and the people who had known the racer, the husband, and the inmate took precedence over the people who had known the poster. Hollywood, which had billed him above the title, sent the usual flowers to a life that had never much wanted the party.
The pictures kept playing as if the man were still just out of frame, lighting a cigarette he was not supposed to have. Bullitt remained the chase. The Great Escape remained the jump. The Thomas Crown Affair remained the suit. Papillon remained the will. The Hunter remained the last job. The nickname remained, too, which would have amused and irritated him in equal measure. He had never asked to be a king. He had asked to leave the cooler.
After he was gone
Chad McQueen became an actor and a racer and has spent years trying to get a Le Mans story made the way his father would have stood for. Terry kept a quieter file. Barbara has written her account. The cars and bikes went to auctions and museums; the Mustang in Bullitt became a relic people still chase down rumors. Boys Republic still tells the McQueen story to boys who need one. The films, especially the 1968 pair, still teach directors how little a star has to do if the camera believes him.
He came out of Beech Grove, survived a missing father and a reform school, took the Marines and Meisner, stole The Magnificent Seven, jumped a fence in Germany, drove San Francisco, robbed his own class as Thomas Crown, sat in a Devil’s Island cell, and died at fifty in Juárez with mesothelioma in the file. If you only remember the Mustang, you have the still. If you remember Chino, the Cooler King, Ibsen, and The Hunter, you have him.
Portrait: Unknown author · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons