Steve McQueen passed away on November 7, 1980, at the age of 50. It had been hard for him to break into acting. But after 30 he became a Hollywood star. His passion for racing cars and the infidelity that saved him from the Mason Clan.
Steve McQueen's conquests were multiple, and most of the time simultaneously. He was awarded romances with each of the actresses with whom he had to act. His first wife was Neile Adams, someone vital in his career. The one she trusted, kept him when she couldn't get a job as an actor. Witnesses and she have narrated situations of abuse and domestic violence. Anger attacks by the actor ended in shouting and hitting. He, without caring about her own and her constant extramarital affairs, was tirelessly jealous of her. At the end of the relationship, he questioned her about whether he had been unfaithful, she denied it but at her insistence, she admitted that she had been unfaithful once with Maximilian Shell. McQueen obtained the confession by holding a gun to his wife's temple. He then gave her a savage beating.
She was the actress of the moment. She came from making an impact with Love Story. Her beauty was also overwhelming. She was the wife of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, Robert Evans. But McQueen was irresistible. They became the top couple in show business. Hard to think of another similar couple. But that was only for the magazines. In private, problems arose quickly. McQueen, as if he hadn't met Ali acting as if she wasn't one of the most sought-after actresses of the moment before the meeting, demanded that she stop acting. She was a woman and she was to stay in her house. She will not be exposed to temptations. Naturally, the same rules didn't apply to him continuing the seductive raid on him.
"There was not a single day in our relationship that he was not under the influence of drugs," Mac Graw recounted many years later. However, the attraction remained and the combination of toughness and helplessness in McQueen continued to magnetize her. There were abuses, threats, and beatings. After several years, she decided to accept a job offer. He tried to dissuade her; since it didn't work out, he then wanted to pay her the same amount that she would earn for the film. Because she was still determined to act, he hit her.
Each McQueen couple reported, years later, a situation of violence. It was a behavior that was repeated.
In 1969, an occasional and unexpected conquest saved him from being in Sharon Tate's house the day she was murdered by the Manson Clan. That fact deepened his paranoia and from then on he always carried a gun with him.
After The escape, came Hell in the Tower. Another event. His salary kept growing. However, at that point, he stopped his run. He became further involved in his passion for speed by buying and testing different racing cars and motorcycles and traveling across the United States. Meanwhile, his relationship with Mac Graw was crumbling under his tyrannical ways. The return, four years later, was disconcerting. An adaptation of An Enemy of the People. Ibsen adapted by Henry Miller played by an unrecognizable McQueen with a thick beard and long hair. He wanted to show that he was a Method actor and quit action movies. The project, predictably, failed. Before cancer won the battle, he had time for two more movies: Tom Horn and El Implacable.
Steve McQueen's great passion was speed. Early in his acting career, he made more money racing motorcycles than he did on the boards. His collection of classic cars and motorcycles was vast and admired by specialists. Every time he could, he made a place to compete, to feel the speed in his body. That was another problem for the producers. He wanted to do the stunts in the movies. He was trained, he had the ability but it was a huge risk that no insurer was going to allow. Thus, who replaced him in the (profuse) scenes with motorcycles or the epic chases in Bullitt and The Escape was Bud Ekins, a professional stuntman. The scene in The Great Escape is still considered one of the most dangerous and difficult ever filmed. Ekins and McQueen struck up a friendship that lasted until the actor's death. On several occasions, they competed together in different races. The friendship between them served as the inspiration for Tarantino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Like that of all actors, his career can be told not only through the films he starred in but also through those he rejected. McQueen's list is profuse and has several masterpieces. Since he was not someone with an easy personality, his demands and fears disguised as bravado left him out of several projects. Other times the producers avoided the despot despite the benefits that his presence could bring him at the box office.
Paul Newman was one of his great obsessions. I competed, quietly, with him. From the beginning of his career. McQueen didn't want to be left in his shadow. They were bidding for the title of man alive. And many of the roles rejected by one were offered to the other. For Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, the producers had thought of the powerful duo of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. But ultimately the Sundance role went to Robert Redford. McQueen in the negotiations intended to charge more than Newman (at least a dollar), appear first in the titles, and even change the name of the film so that his character would appear ahead. They shared the cast, shortly after, in hell to the Tower, a vehicle of Cinema Catastrophe, that genre that reigned in the early seventies that used to gather stars in its films. Steve McQueen, long before the word and its tools for calculating characters, recounted the script word by word and demanded that his character be added at least 12 sentences to have the same number of lines as Paul Newman. He also managed to modify the original story so that he was the last of the two to appear on the screen.
Francis Ford Coppola, who had been wanting to have him in The Conversation (in those years he also rejected Contact in France: "I don't want to do another police one," he said), offered him the role of Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now. It was something he was waiting for. A great character, and a dense story, by the hand of a successful and prestigious director. But shortly after accepting, he thought better of it and didn't think it was a good idea to leave Ali MacGraw alone for three months (he turned down The Exorcist for the same reason). His jealousy did not allow it. So he opted to ask for and get the role of Colonel Kurtz (the one that would eventually be played by Marlon Brando) which would only take him three weeks to shoot. But, as is known, he also declined to be Kurz.
He also turned down Spielberg when he called him up for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was the first choice for Dirty Harry (Bullit could have been his franchise, but McQueen didn't accept sequels: the role was too demanding and intense to play more than once, he said).
In 1978 they discovered a tumor in his lung. Conventional treatments available at the time could do little. By the early 1980s, the metastases had invaded his body. Until someone told him about a new method, about something hidden and revolutionary that a doctor in Ciudad Juárez, in Mexico, put into practice. That's where McQueen went with his desperation and millions of him. Dr. William Kelley used methods so untraditional that the whole thing couldn't even be called medical treatment. He wasn't an oncologist either, he wasn't even a trained doctor. He had been a dentist but a few years earlier his license had been revoked for malpractice. In those hands, he put Steve McQueen's final. On November 7, 1980, shortly after his 50th birthday, Steve McQueen died of a heart attack following surgery in Mexico.
His fans around the world mourned the loss of him. He died at the pinnacle of his career when he wowed the most diverse audiences. Over the years, the veil fell away and those who knew him revealed details of his life and completed the story. The iconic actor, we now know, was haunted by ghosts.
