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 didn’t like working with directors or producers. In retaliation, he would only work if paid a higher than average "movie star" salary for his films.
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, CA). Soon McQueen left the school and drifted before joining the Marines in 1947.
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 replaced Sammy Davis, Jr. in the Frank Sinatra vehicle Never So Few in 1959 when Sinatra quarrelled with Davis; John Sturges, this film's director, cast McQueen in his next movie, promising to "give him the camera." Along with Yul Brynner, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn, McQueen's first major hit was Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960). The film was based on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.
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. McQueen had an amazing motorcycle chase sequence in which he was "crucified" on barbed wire at the end.
Another successful film came in 1968 with Bullitt, which thrilled audiences with an unprecedented (but 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. He was the world's highest paid actor by this time, largely because of his incomparable popularity in Asia. After The Towering Inferno co-starring long time rival Paul Newman in 1974, McQueen did not return to film until 1978. When he returned to film in 1978's An Enemy of the People he played against type an overweight heavily bearded character.
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