Though he died in 1980 at the age of 50, I still can’t quite believe that Steve McQueen is dead. He was a cool and modern actor, whose style lives on in Matt Damon and Ryan Phillippe.
Unfortunately, here’s another violent, drunken pot-head who, while energetically “bedding young and willing starlets”, would beat up his wives should they so much as glance at other men.
Ali MacGraw, one of his wives, came in for particularly abusive treatment, with McQueen “punching and jabbing and smacking her in the face”.
McQueen became “domineering, distant and non-verbal”. It can be traced back to childhood. Steve’s father was “a philandering stunt pilot for a travelling circus” and his mother “a teenage alcoholic prostitute”.
He worked on an oil rig and it was when scrubbing and repairing asbestos-laden pipes that he contracted the disease that would kill him. Somehow or other, this troubled hunk became an actor.
Starting out in a horror pic called The Blob, he soon upstaged Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven. McQueen’s hobby was collecting motorbikes. He had135, plus 35 vintage cars. – Daily Mail