Steve McQueen Biography

MARITAL STATUS
Professions Actor , Producer , Executive Producer more
Birth name Terrence Steven McQueen
Nationality American
Birth March 24, 1930 (Beech Grove, Indiana – United States)
Death November 7, 1980

BIOGRAPHY
Terrence Steven McQueen (his real name) experiences a lonely childhood that will shape his life indelibly. Abandoned by his parents, Steve McQueen is raised as an orphan. His father, an acrobatic aviator, disappeared shortly after his birth while his mother abandoned him on a farm. Steve McQueen will find the woman who gave birth to him a few years later but will never forgive her for having abandoned him. An uncontrollable teenager, McQueen gets involved with gangs of Los Angeles thugs. He left school very early and finally joined the merchant navy and then the military navy (1947).

Steve McQueen studied acting from 1952 at the Actor’s Studio. He made his first steps on the Broadway stages in the play A Hatful of Rain in 1955. The following year, he appeared in his first film, Marked by Hate , under the direction of Robert Wise . Solitary and withdrawn, aggressive at times, he is still considered with many reservations by the studios. He nevertheless ended up obtaining the role that would propel him to Hollywood stardom, that of bounty hunter Josh Randall, in the television series In the Name of the Law . He will appear in total in 94 episodes for three seasons, from 1958 to 1961.

1958 is a big year for McQueen, since he also obtains that year the first major role of his career with Planetary Danger . In the 1960s, the actor quickly became one of the most sought-after actors of his generation. He toured several times with John Sturges , first in The Prey of Vultures (1959). He is mainly part of the cast of The Seven Mercenaries alongside Yul Brynner , Charles Bronson , and James Coburn (1960). He will meet Sturges again in 1963 during The Great Escape in which he himself suggests the idea of ​​escaping on a motorcycle, a sequence that has become legendary.

McQueen participated in Hell Is for Heroes before agreeing to turn in A Certain Encounter by Robert Mulligan (1963) where he rubbed shoulders with the heroine of The Fury of Life , Natalie Wood . A keen player, Steve McQueen was next in The Kid from Cincinnati (1965), for his first collaboration with Norman Jewison , before reuniting with the director of these debuts, Robert Wise – in the middle of the Chinese civil war – in The Gunboat of the Yangtze(1966). His role earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1967.

In 1968, Steve McQueen made two of his most famous films. During a game of chess, he plays a torrid game of seduction with Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair . He continues with Bullitt ( Peter Yates ), a legendary film in which we find the most incredible chase sequences in the history of cinema. McQueen will try again (with less success) to link his love for speed and car racing with cinema on the occasion of a film all about the glory of motor sports, Le Mans in 1971. In the

70s, Steve McQueen continued to appear in films as important as Peckinpah ‘s The Ambush (1972) – where he met Ali McGraw , whom he married the following year – but also Franklin J. Schaffner ‘s Butterfly (1973) and The Tower infernale (1974) under the direction of John Guillermin . Afterwards, McQueen becomes nothing more than a shadow of himself. He gained weight, grew a beard and was rumored to have alleged substance abuse problems. The actor is in fact eaten away by cancer. He only toured very little and ended up isolating himself in Mexico, looking for new treatments to heal himself. McQueen divorces Ali McGraw and marries a third time, to a young top model, Barbara Minty. He will shoot his last film The Hunter , in 1980.