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Early life He was born Terence Steven McQueen in Beech Grove, Indiana. He never knew his father (who abandoned his wife and child shortly after McQueen was born) - although he did find the house where he lived approximately a year after his father's death. His mother left him at an early age and he was raised in Slater, Missouri by his uncle. At the age of 12 he was reunited with his mother and went to live in Los Angeles, California. However by the time he was 14 she had sent him to the Boys Republic home for wayward boys in Chino Hills, California. After McQueen left Chino, he drifted before joining the United States Marine Corps in 1947 and served until 1950. In 1952, with financial assistance of the G.I. Bill, McQueen began studying acting and auditioned to study at Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio in New York. Of the 2000 people who auditioned that year, only McQueen and Martin Landau were accepted. McQueen made his Broadway debut in 1955 in A Hatful of Rain. Wanted: Dead or Alive After various live and filmed television guest appearances in the mid-1950s, McQueen gained both regular employment and his 'break-out' role with the Western series Wanted: Dead or Alive. From 1958 to 1961, McQueen played Josh Randall, a lone bounty hunter whose weapon of choice was a sawed-off Winchester repeating rifle nicknamed the 'Mare's Leg.' While the character of Randall traveled the Wild West helping various people he met, it was the anti-hero image of a bounty-hunter, played with precisely the right amount of mystery, alienation and detachment by McQueen, that made this show stand out from among the large group of typical Westerns on American TV at the time. The character had been introduced the previous year in an episode of Trackdown, another western TV series, featuring Robert Culp. The Magnificent Seven McQueen moved into film in the mid-1950s with bit parts in Girl on the Run (1953) and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). He secured his first lead role in the 1958 horror movie The Blob. He then replaced Sammy Davis, Jr. in the Frank Sinatra vehicle Never So Few in 1959 when Sinatra quarrelled with Davis. The director, John Sturges, then cast McQueen in his next movie, promising to "give him the camera". Starring with Yul Brynner, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven (1960), it would be McQueen's first major hit. The Great Escape McQueen's next big film was 1963's The Great Escape (which also starred Bronson and Coburn, as well as second-billed James Garner). The smash hit movie told the more or less true story of a massive breakout from a World War II POW camp and McQueen has a memorable role in the climax of the film, highlighted by a spectacular motorcycle leap. McQueen's friend and fellow cycle enthusiast Bud Ekins, who resembled McQueen from a distance, actually made the jump, but the general public did not know that for years. Bullitt and later films Another successful film came in 1968 with Bullitt, which thrilled audiences with an unprecedented (and endlessly imitated) auto chase through San Francisco, with Bud Ekins again doubling for some of the more hazardous work. Prior to that, he earned his only Academy Award nomination for the 1966 film The Sand Pebbles. McQueen also appeared in 1973's Papillon, the 1971 car race drama Le Mans, and in The Getaway in 1972. Personal life McQueen was the world's highest paid actor by the time of The Getaway. After ''The Towering Inferno'', co-starring with his long time friend and rival Paul Newman in 1974, McQueen did not return to film until 1978 with An Enemy of the People playing against type as an overweight, heavily bearded character, in this adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play. The film was little seen and has never been released on Video or DVD, but is aired from time to time on PBS. Little known, but true--Steve McQueen became a born-again Christian just shortly before he died in 1980. He was, up until his death, hosting weekly Bible study devotionals in his own home (A & E Biography 2004). Marriages McQueen married 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 (born December 28, 1960 and now an actor - as is his son, Steven R. McQueen, born 1988). 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. Arrest In 1972 McQueen was arrested in Anchorage, Alaska, for driving under the influence of alcohol and skipped bail. Motor Racer 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. The most memorable were the classic chase in Bullitt and the motorcycle chase scene in The Great Escape. The jump over the fence was actually done by Bud Elkins for insurance purposes. (However, McQueen did have a considerable amount of screen time while 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 and chasing himself on another bike). During his acting career he considered becoming a professional race car driver. In the 1970 race 12 Hours of Sebring, Peter Revson and McQueen (driving with a cast on his left foot from a motorcycle accident two weeks before) won in their (engine size) class and missed wiinning overall by a scant 23 seconds to Mario Andretti in a Ferrari with a Porsche 908/02. The same car was used as a camera car for ''Le Mans'' in the 24 Hours of Le Mans later that year, entered by his production company Solar Productions. However, the film was a box office flop that almost ruined McQueen's career and McQueen himself admitted that he almost died while filming the movie. McQueen himself wanted to enter a Porsche 917 together with Jackie Stewart in the 1970 Le Mans race but the backers for his film project threatened to pull their support if he drove in the race. Faced with driving for 24 hours in the race, or the entire summer making the film, McQueen opted to do the latter. He also competed in off-road motorcycle racing. 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 1976. 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. 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 luxurious and exotic sportscars, including: To his dismay, McQueen was never able to own the legendary Ford Mustang GT that he drove in Bullitt. There were two cars used for filming. It is rumored that both models of the car mysteriously disappeared after the film wrapped (similar to the Easy Rider bikes). The film's director Peter Yates recently stated in a radio interview that both vehicles are still extant (BBC Radio 4, 7 January 2006) (see *). Death McQueen died at the age of 50, on November 7, 1980, in Juárez, Mexico of a heart attack following cancer surgery. McQueen had traveled to the Santa Rosa Clinic in Mexico for alternative treatments for mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer caused by asbestos exposure. It is unclear whether the asbestos exposure came from his racing career or from an experience in the United States Marine Corps; he wore an asbestos-insulated racers suit in his race cars (flame-resistant drivers uniforms are made from Nomex and were never made from asbestos, except possibly some early drag racers suits) and when working on his own cars and motorbikes would use an asbestos soaked rag to cover his mouth from other fumes, and McQueen himself admitted that he was exposed to the deadly insulating material during his stint in the Marines. Controversy arose over his Mexican trip, because McQueen sought a very non-traditional treatment that used coffee enemas and laetrile, a supposedly "natural" anti-cancer drug available in Mexico but not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In any event, the cancer was too far advanced for any treatment to have been effective. In 1999, McQueen was posthumously inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame. Personal information McQueen's height was approximately 5'9". He had a daily two-hour exercise regime, involving weightlifting and at one point running five miles, seven days a week. However, he was also known for his prolific drug use (William Caxton claimed he smoked marijuana almost every day; others said he used a tremendous amount of cocaine), in addition, like most actors of his era, he was a smoker. If McQueen had gone to see actress Sharon Tate as planned on August 9, 1969, instead of on a date, he could have been murdered along with five others by the followers of Charles Manson. After that close call and hearing that he was on Manson's death list, he began carrying a gun. McQueen had a reputation for demanding free items 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 items because he was donating them to the Boy's Republic reformatory school for displaced youth, where McQueen spent time during his youth. McQueen was later said to have made occasional visits to the school to spend time with the students and play pool with them. Chuck Norris taught McQueen's son karate; later, McQueen convinced Chuck to attend acting classes. 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, Apocalypse Now and Dirty Harry. He had been interested in starring in First Blood, but could not due to his illness/death. He had also been offered the Kevin Costner role in The Bodyguard when it was first proposed in 1976. McQueen was also interested in making the film version of Waiting for Godot. During his time away from film he developed an interest in the classic playwrights. This led him to Beckett's Godot, but the playwright had never heard of Steve McQueen. Hobbies Pop culture mentions "Seem em on the big screen like Steve McQueen, do something and never be back once he leave the scene." Filmography | |||||||||
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