Background and career
Terrence Stephen McQueen (March 24, 1930 – November 7, 1980) was an American actor. His antihero persona, emphasized during the height of 1960s counterculture, made him a top box office draw for his films of the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. He was nicknamed the "King of Cool" and used the alias "Harvey Mushman" when participating in motor races. McQueen received nominations for an Academy Award, Golden Globe Award and a Laurel Award for his role in Robert Wise's epic 1920s drama The Sand Pebbles (1966). His other popular films include The Blob (1958), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Nevada Smith (1966), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Bullitt (1968), The Getaway (1972) and Papillon (1973), in addition to ensemble films such as The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963)—a turn which earned him both a Moscow International Film Festival Award and a Laurel Award nomination—On Any Sunday (1971), and the box office smash-hit The Towering Inferno (1974). He became the world's highest-paid movie star in 1974; however, afterwards, he did not appear in a film for another four years. Although he was combative with directors and producers, his popularity placed him in high demand and enabled him to negotiate the largest salaries. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, McQueen flew to Mexico in October 1980 for surgery to remove or reduce tumors in his neck and abdomen, against the advice of U.S. doctors who warned him that his cancer was inoperable and that his heart could not withstand the surgery. A few weeks later, he checked in to a hospital in Ciudad Juárez under a fake name and underwent surgery by hospital staff who were unaware of his true identity. A few hours after surgery, he died of a heart attack at the age of 50.
Terrence Stephen McQueen was born at the former St. Francis Hospital in Beech Grove, Indiana, on March 24, 1930, the son of Julia Ann (or Julianne) Crawford and flying circus stunt pilot William McQueen. He was of Scottish descent and grew up in a Catholic household. He was raised by his mother, after being abandoned by his father when he was six months old. Several biographers have stated that his mother was an alcoholic. Unable to cope with caring for him, she decided in 1933 to leave him with her parents Lillian and Victor in Slater, Missouri. As the Great Depression worsened, McQueen and his grandparents moved in with Lillian's brother Claude and his family at their farm in Slater. McQueen later said that he had good memories of living on the farm, noting that his great-uncle Claude was a "very good, very strong, [and] very fair" man from whom he "learned a lot". Claude gave McQueen a red tricycle on his fourth birthday, which McQueen subsequently credited with sparking his early interest in car racing. His mother, who had since married, brought McQueen from the farm to live with her and his stepfather in Indianapolis when he was eight years old. He later recalled, "The day I left the farm, Uncle Claude gave me a personal going-away present—a gold pocket watch, with an inscription inside the case." The inscription read: "To Steve, who has been a son to me." Dyslexic and partially deaf due to a childhood ear infection, McQueen did not adjust well to school or his new life, and his stepfather beat him to such an extent that he left home to live on the streets at the age of nine. He later said, "When a kid doesn't have any love when he's small, he begins to wonder if he's good enough. My mother didn't love me, and I didn't have a father. I thought, 'Well, I must not be very good.'" Julia wrote to Claude when McQueen was 12, asking that he be returned to her again to live in Los Angeles, where she now lived with her second husband. By McQueen's own account, he and his new stepfather "locked horns immediately". McQueen recalls him being "a prime son of a bitch" who was not averse to beating both McQueen and Julia. McQueen began to rebel again and was sent back to live with Claude for a final time. At age 14, he left Claude's farm without saying goodbye and joined a circus for a short time. He drifted back to his mother and stepfather in Los Angeles, resuming his life as a gang member and petty criminal. He was caught stealing hubcaps by the police and handed over to his stepfather, who beat him severely and threw him down a flight of stairs. McQueen looked up at his stepfather and said, "You lay your stinking hands on me again and I swear I'll kill you." After this incident, McQueen's stepfather persuaded his mother to sign a court order saying that McQueen was incorrigible, remanding him to the California Junior Boys Republic in Chino Hills. McQueen began to change and mature there, but he was not popular with the other boys at first: "Say the boys had a chance once a month to load into a bus and go into town to see a movie. And they lost out because one guy in the bungalow didn't get his work done right. Well, you can pretty well guess they're gonna have something to say about that. I paid my dues with the other fellows quite a few times. I got my lumps, no doubt about it. The other guys in the bungalow had ways of paying you back for interfering with their well-being." McQueen gradually became a role model and was elected to the Boys Council, a group that set the rules and regulations governing the boys' lives. He left the Boys Republic at age 16. When he later became famous as an actor, he regularly returned to talk to resident boys and retained a lifelong association with the center. At age 16, he returned to live with his mother, who had since moved to New York City's Greenwich Village. He met two sailors from the Merchant Marine there and decided to sign on to a ship bound for the Dominican Republic. Once there, he abandoned his new post and was eventually employed at a brothel. He later ventured to Texas and drifted from job to job, including selling pens at a traveling carnival and working as a lumberjack in Canada. Upon his arrest for vagrancy in the Deep South, McQueen served a 30-day assignment on a chain gang. In 1947, after receiving permission from his mother since he was not yet 18 years old, McQueen enlisted in the U.S. Marines and was sent to Parris Island, South Carolina, for boot camp. He was promoted to private first class and assigned to an armored unit. He initially struggled with conforming to the discipline of the service and later said, "I was busted back down to private about seven times". He took an unauthorized absence, failing to return after a weekend pass expired, and was caught by the shore patrol while staying with his girlfriend, Barbara Ross, for two weeks. After resisting arrest, he was sentenced to 41 days in the brig. After this, McQueen resolved to focus his energies on self-improvement and embraced the Marines' discipline. He saved the lives of five other Marines during an Arctic exercise, pulling them from a tank before it broke through ice into the sea. He was assigned to the honor guard responsible for guarding USS Williamsburg, the presidential yacht of Harry S. Truman. He served until 1950, when he was honorably discharged. He later said he had enjoyed his time in the Marines, remembering it as a formative time in his life: "The Marines made a man out of me. I learned how to get along with others, and I had a platform to jump off."
In 1952, with financial assistance under the G.I. Bill, McQueen began studying acting in New York at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse and at HB Studio under Uta Hagen. He reportedly delivered his first dialogue on a theater stage in a 1952 play produced by Yiddish theater star Molly Picon. McQueen's character spoke one brief line: "Alts iz farloyrn." ("All is lost.") During this time, he also studied acting with Stella Adler, in whose class he met Gia Scala. Long enamored of cars and motorcycles, McQueen began to earn money by competing in weekend motorcycle races at Long Island City Raceway. He purchased the first two of many motorcycles, a Harley-Davidson and a Triumph. He soon became an excellent racer, winning about $100 each weekend (equivalent to $1,200 in 2025). He appeared as a musical judge in an episode of ABC's Jukebox Jury, which aired in the 1953–1954 season. McQueen had minor roles in stage productions, including Peg o' My Heart, The Member of the Wedding and Two Fingers of Pride. He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in the play A Hatful of Rain starring Ben Gazzara. In late 1955, McQueen left New York and headed for Los Angeles. He moved into a house on Vestal Avenue in the Echo Park area, and sought acting jobs in Hollywood.
When McQueen appeared in a two-part Westinghouse Studio One television presentation entitled "The Defender", Hollywood manager Hilly Elkins took note of him and decided that B movies would be a good place for the young actor to make his mark. McQueen's first film role under Elkins' management was a bit part in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), directed by Robert Wise and starring Paul Newman. McQueen was subsequently hired for the films The Blob (his first leading role), Never Love a Stranger, and The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959). McQueen's first breakout role came on television. He appeared on Dale Robertson's NBC Western series Tales of Wells Fargo as Bill Longley. Elkins, then McQueen's manager, successfully lobbied Vincent M. Fennelly, producer of the Western series Trackdown, to have McQueen read for the part of bounty hunter Josh Randall. He first appeared in Season 1, Episode 21, of Trackdown in 1958. He appeared as Randall in that episode, cast opposite series lead Robert Culp, a former New York motorcycle racing buddy. McQueen appeared again on Trackdown in Episode 31 of the first season, in which he played twin brothers, one of whom was an outlaw sought by Culp's character, Hoby Gilman.
McQueen next filmed a pilot episode for what became the series, Wanted Dead or Alive, which aired on CBS in September 1958. It became his breakout role. In interviews associated with the DVD release of Wanted: Dead or Alive, Robert Culp of Trackdown claimed credit for bringing McQueen to Hollywood and landing him the part of Randall. He said he taught McQueen the "art of the fast-draw". Culp said that by the second day of filming, McQueen beat him at it. McQueen became a household name as a result of the series. Randall's special holster held a sawed-off .44–40 Winchester rifle (nicknamed the "Mare's Leg") instead of the sixgun carried by the typical Western character, although the cartridges in the gunbelt were dummy .45-70, chosen because they "looked tougher." As noted in the three-part DVD special feature on the background of the series, the generally negative image of the bounty hunter added to the antihero image infused with mystery and detachment that made this show stand out from the typical TV Western. The 94 episodes which ran from 1958 until early 1961 kept McQueen steadily employed, and he became a fixture at the Iverson Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, where much of the outdoor action for Wanted: Dead or Alive was shot. At age 29, McQueen got a significant break when Frank Sinatra removed Sammy Davis Jr. from the film Never So Few after Davis supposedly made some mildly negative remarks about Sinatra in a radio interview, and Davis's role went to McQueen. Sinatra saw something special in McQueen and ensured that the young actor got plenty of closeups in a role that earned McQueen favorable reviews. McQueen's character, Bill Ringa, was never more comfortable than when driving at high speed—in this case, in a Jeep—or handling a switchblade or a tommy gun.
After Never So Few, the film's director John Sturges cast McQueen in his next movie, promising to "give him the camera". The Magnificent Seven (1960), in which he played Vin Tanner and starred with Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz and James Coburn, became McQueen's first major hit and led to his withdrawal from Wanted: Dead or Alive. McQueen's focused portrayal of the taciturn second lead catapulted his career. His added touches in many of the shots, such as shaking his shotgun cartridges beside his ear before loading them, repeatedly checking his gun while in the background of a shot, and wiping his hat rim, annoyed top-billed Brynner, who protested that McQueen was stealing scenes. In his autobiography, Eli Wallach reports struggling to conceal his amusement while watching the filming of the funeral procession scene in which Brynner's and McQueen's characters first meet. Brynner was furious at McQueen's shotgun round-twirl, which effectively diverted the viewer's attention to McQueen. Brynner refused to draw his gun in the same scene with McQueen, knowing that his character would probably be outdrawn. McQueen played the top-billed lead role in the next big Sturges film, 1963's The Great Escape, Hollywood's fictional depiction of the true story of a historic mass escape from a World War II POW camp, Stalag Luft III. Insurance concerns prevented McQueen from performing the film's notable motorcycle leap, which was done by his friend and fellow cycle enthusiast Bud Ekins, who resembled McQueen from a distance. When Johnny Carson later tried to congratulate McQueen for the jump during a broadcast of The Tonight Show, McQueen said, "It wasn't me. That was Bud Ekins." This film established McQueen's box-office clout and secured his status as a superstar. Also in 1963, McQueen starred in Love with the Proper Stranger with Natalie Wood. He later appeared as the titular Nevada Smith, a character from Harold Robbins' novel The Carpetbaggers, portrayed by Alan Ladd two years earlier in a movie version of that novel. Nevada Smith was an enormously successful Western action adventure prequel that also featured Karl Malden and Suzanne Pleshette. After starring in 1965's The Cincinnati Kid as a poker player, McQueen earned his only Academy Award nomination in 1966 for his role as an engine room sailor in The Sand Pebbles, in which he starred opposite Richard Crenna, Candice Bergen, and Richard Attenborough, with whom he had previously worked in The Great Escape. After being nominated for an Oscar, McQueen was in Bullitt (1968) – one of his best-known films and his personal favorite – which co-starred Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Vaughn, and Don Gordon. It featured an unprecedented (and endlessly imitated) car chase through San Francisco. Although McQueen did the driving that appeared in closeups, his was about 10% of what is seen in the film's car chase. The rest of the driving by McQueen's character was done by stunt drivers Bud Ekins and Loren Janes. McQueen's character drove a 1968 Highland Green Ford Mustang GT 390 4-speed, while the Chicago mob hitmen's 1968 black Dodge Charger R/T 440 4-speed was driven by veteran stunt driver Bill Hickman. McQueen, his stunt drivers, and Hickman spent several days before the scene was shot practicing high-speed close-quarters driving. Bullitt was so far over budget that Warner Bros. canceled the contract on the rest of his films, seven in all. When Bullitt became a major box-office success, Warner Bros. tried to woo McQueen back, but he refused, and his next film was made with an independent studio and released by United Artists. For the film, McQueen went for a change of image, playing a debonair role as a wealthy executive in The Thomas Crown Affair with Faye Dunaway in 1968. He signed a deal with Cinema Center Films to star in and produce films. In 1969, McQueen made the Southern period piece, The Reivers, based on a novel by William Faulkner.
