Actors - Steve McQueen

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	Actors - Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen (March 24, 1930 – November 7, 1980) was an American movie actor. Nicknamed "The King of Cool," he was considered one of the biggest box-office draws of the 1960s and 1970s due to what many film goers consider a captivating on-screen persona. McQueen was considered a combative and archetypal "difficult movie star" who disliked working with directors or producers. To compensate, he would work only if paid a higher-than-average "movie star" salary for his films.

Early life

He was born Terence Steven McQueen in Beech Grove, Indiana. He never knew his father—although McQueen did find the house where he lived approximately a year after his father's death. McQueen's father abandoned his wife and child shortly after McQueen was born. He was raised in Slater, Missouri by his uncle, where his mother left him. At the age of 12 McQueen moved with his mother to Los Angeles. When he was 14, his mother sent him to a reformatory school, Boy's Republic, in Chino, California. Soon McQueen left the school and drifted before joining the United States Marine Corps in 1947. 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
.

Key appearances

Wanted: Dead or Alive

After various live and filmed television guest appearances in the mid-1950's, 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 the U.S.'s 'small screen' in those days. The character had been introduced the previous year in an episode of Trackdown featuring Robert Culp, another western TV series.

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 James Garner). (Quentin Tarantino has called the film the shortest three hour movie he's ever seen.)

Bullit 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. 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.

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