Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen was the highest-paid film star in the world at his peak and did his own driving. Born in Indiana in 1930, he was abandoned by his father before birth and left by his mother with a great-uncle on a farm; he was partly deaf from a childhood infection, ran with a street gang, and was sent at fourteen to the California Junior Boys Republic, a reform school he supported financially for the rest of his life. He served in the Marines, was demoted repeatedly, and then saved five men from drowning in the Arctic during an exercise. He studied acting on the GI Bill under Sanford Meisner, took over from Ben Gazzara on Broadway, and got a television series, Wanted Dead or Alive, in 1958. The Magnificent Seven in 1960 made him a film star, and he spent it upstaging Yul Brynner with small pieces of business — checking a shotgun, shaking a shell — which is the technique he built a career on: doing less than everyone else on screen. The Great Escape in 1963 gave him the motorcycle sequence, most of which he rode himself, including riding as a pursuing German soldier so that he chased himself. Bullitt in 1968 has the car chase through San Francisco that every later one is measured against. He was a genuinely serious racing driver, finishing second at Sebring in 1970 with a broken foot. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma, probably from asbestos in racing suits or naval insulation, and died in Mexico in 1980 at fifty. He had taken up flying vintage biplanes in his last years and was posthumously awarded a place among the highest-grossing stars of his era.
- Lived: 1969 CE – ?
- Nationality: British
- Roles: writer
