Steve McQueen

Terrence Stephen McQueen was born on March 24, 1930, at St. Francis Hospital in Beech Grove, Indiana, the son of Julia Ann Crawford and William McQueen, a flying circus stunt pilot. Of Scottish descent and raised Catholic, McQueen was abandoned by his father at six months old and left in the care of his maternal grandparents, Lillian and Victor, in Slater, Missouri, in 1933. As the Great Depression deepened, he moved with his grandparents to the farm of Lillian's brother Claude in Slater. McQueen later credited his great-uncle Claude as a formative influence, describing him as a man from whom he learned a great deal. A red tricycle given to him by Claude on his fourth birthday sparked what would become a lifelong passion for racing. Claude also presented him with a gold pocket watch inscribed "To Steve, who has been a son to me" when McQueen left the farm at age eight to rejoin his mother, who had remarried and relocated to Indianapolis.

McQueen was dyslexic and partially deaf due to a childhood ear infection. His stepfather's physical abuse drove him to leave home at nine and live on the streets. At twelve, he was brought to Los Angeles to live again with his mother and her second husband, a situation he described as immediately contentious and marked by further violence. After being caught stealing hubcaps, he was remanded to the California Junior Boys Republic in Chino Hills, where he eventually matured, was elected to the Boys Council, and developed a lifelong association with the institution. He left the Boys Republic at sixteen and returned to his mother, who had since moved to New York City's Greenwich Village. He subsequently signed on to a Merchant Marine vessel bound for the Dominican Republic, later drifted through Texas and Canada working jobs including carnival sales and lumberjacking, and served a thirty-day chain gang assignment following a vagrancy arrest in the Deep South.

In 1947, with his mother's permission, McQueen enlisted in the U.S. Marines and reported to Parris Island, South Carolina, for boot camp. He was promoted to private first class and assigned to an armored unit, though he struggled with military discipline and was demoted to private approximately seven times by his own account. Following an unauthorized absence and subsequent resistance to arrest, he served forty-one days in the brig before committing to self-improvement. He saved the lives of five fellow Marines during an Arctic exercise by pulling them from a tank before it broke through ice, and was later assigned to the honor guard for USS Williamsburg, the presidential yacht of Harry S. Truman. He was honorably discharged in 1950.

Using financial assistance from the G.I. Bill, McQueen began studying acting in New York in 1952 at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse and at HB Studio under Uta Hagen. He also studied with Stella Adler, in whose class he met Gia Scala. He reportedly delivered his first stage dialogue in a 1952 production associated with Yiddish theater star Molly Picon, speaking a single line in Yiddish. During this period he supplemented his income by competing in weekend motorcycle races at Long Island City Raceway, having purchased both a Harley-Davidson and a Triumph, and earning approximately one hundred dollars per weekend. He appeared as a musical judge in an episode of ABC's Jukebox Jury. In 1955, McQueen made his Broadway debut in the drama A Hatful of Rain.

His film career gained momentum through the late 1950s and accelerated through the following decade. He received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in The Sand Pebbles in 1966. Among his other notable films were The Cincinnati Kid and Nevada Smith, both from 1965 and 1966 respectively, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, both released in 1968, The Getaway in 1972, and Papillon in 1973. He also appeared in ensemble productions including The Magnificent Seven in 1960, The Great Escape in 1963, and The Towering Inferno in 1974. His antihero screen persona aligned closely with the counterculture of the 1960s and made him one of the dominant box office draws of the era. By 1974 he had become the world's highest-paid movie star, though he did not appear in another film for four years after that point. Despite a reputation for conflict with directors and producers, his commercial appeal kept him in high demand and allowed him to negotiate substantial salaries. He used the alias Harvey Mushman when participating in motor races and was widely known by the nickname the King of Cool.

Diagnosed with terminal cancer, McQueen traveled to Mexico in October 1980 to pursue surgery aimed at removing or reducing tumors in his neck and abdomen, a course of treatment that American doctors had advised against, warning that his cancer was inoperable and that his heart could not survive the procedure. He checked into a hospital in Ciudad Juárez under a false name, and the hospital staff who performed the surgery were unaware of his true identity. He died of a heart attack a few hours after the operation on November 7, 1980, at the age of fifty.