By Lucie M. Winborne, ReMIND Magazine
The ruggedly handsome, devil-may-care-cool Terrence Steven McQueen was born in Beech Grove, Ind., on March 24, 1930. The actor was as well-known for his passion for motorcycles and racecars (he once commented that he wasn’t sure “whether I’m an actor who races or a racer who acts”) as he was for his ’60s and ’70s action films such as Bullitt and The Getaway.
Beneath the tough-guy exterior, though, was a man scarred early by parental abandonment. His father, William, left when Steve was just a few months old, and his mother, Julian, had little maternal instinct and left her son in the care of his great-granduncle on a Missouri farm. Reunited with her at around age 12, following her remarriage, Steve’s involvement with street gangs and arrest for stealing hubcaps prompted Julian to send him to reform school.
Once he left school, McQueen embarked on a series of short-term jobs, ranging from merchant mariner to carnival worker, before enlisting in the Marines, where he was “busted back down to private about seven times.” Discharged in 1950, the young man drifted until an actress girlfriend helped set him on the path to his true calling.
Granted, his start was hardly auspicious — a one-line bit part cut after only four shows — but by 1955 McQueen had been accepted to the Actors Studio to study with the legendary Lee Strasberg. His big break came as Steve Andrews in the sci-fi cult favorite The Blob, and further fame followed with the role of bounty hunter Josh Randall in the TV Western Wanted: Dead or Alive. Afterward came box office hits The Cincinnati Kid, military drama The Sand Pebbles (for which he received his only Academy Award nomination) and The Thomas Crown Affair, but one of his most memorable performances was at the wheel of a ’68 Mustang in Bullitt, tearing through San Francisco after a pair of hitmen, in a scene still regarded by many as the greatest car chase in cinema history.
Offscreen, McQueen’s romantic life was equally tempestuous. His first marriage, to actress/dancer Neile Adams, ended in divorce, and his second, to Ali MacGraw in 1973, also combusted from Steve’s drinking, drug use and adultery. McQueen won high praise for prison drama Papillon, and played heroic fire chief Michael O’Hallorhan in 1974’s The Towering Inferno, but five years later long-term health issues came to a head with a diagnosis of terminal mesothelioma. Shortly afterward he married for the final time, to much-younger model Barbara Minty, but since his illness was so advanced, he spent his last months pursuing alternative treatments in Mexico — a fighter, on his own terms, to the end.
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