King of Cool

Steve McQueen was an actor, racing driver, style icon and, in the mix, the biggest film star of his generation. A charismatic favourite with women and the public, he shaped pop culture like no other Hollywood star.

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Mainly because Steve McQueen was real, was experienced as real. That's how he was, that's how he wanted to be. Exactly like that. An authenticity that he consciously lived and also knew how to handle very carefully. McQueen loved what he did - and he was damn good at it. Average was not an option. He wanted to be a star. The star.

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His characters' passion for motorsport, speed and extreme situations was his own. A talented and experienced car guy, he was always seriously involved in top-level car and motorbike races. In 1964, he was part of the US team that travelled to Erfurt in the former GDR for the International Motocross Six Days, in 1970 he finished second in the Twelve Hours of Sebring in a Porsche 908/02, and if his actor's insurance hadn't protested so strongly, he would have been on the grid with Jackie Stewart, the reigning Formula 1 world champion, in the 24-hour classic at Le Mans that same year.

It goes without saying that Steve McQueen could hardly be stopped from preferring to perform his stunts himself. The famous motorbike chase in Broken Chains, for example, was only added for McQueen afterwards. After reviewing the script, he threatened to simply cancel the production because he didn't find his role credible enough. When the stuntmen who were actually supposed to take part realised how dangerous the renegotiated shoot with McQueen would be for them, they refused completely. So McQueen, as Captain Virgil Hilts, was not only allowed to jump over a barbed wire fence himself in his legendary wide Stalag jumper, but also to take on the role of his opponent in these new scenes without further ado. With a customised uniform outfit, he then pursued himself for the filming.

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McQueen was only slowed down once by the insurance policies of the production companies. Like on the set of the Hollywood classic Bullitt. There, too, it was the insurers who were definitely not prepared to insure the now valuable star during the most dangerous seconds of his low-speed chase through the streets of San Francisco. To avoid challenging McQueen's commitment too much, the team sometimes filmed secretly before work started or long after hours. In many of the less risky scenes in the 1968 blockbuster, McQueen was then able to make his long, penetrating gaze into the history of action cinema. His clothes, his attitude, his movements with that springy, confident gait and the character portrayed in the film still have an impact today. Ever since Bullitt, all film cops have dreamed of being so stylish and so tough. Such an authentic, flawed anti-hero. McQueen the leading man, the fixed star. "He created the image of a modern action hero," is how his biographer Marshall Terrill sums it up.

"In films, style is the content," explained Norman Jewison, the director of Thomas Crown. This brilliantly staged, intelligently ironic crime comedy shows how you can develop a high-tension story with a calm narrative style and almost no suspense - if you have Steve McQueen on your side. Crown remains inscrutable to the viewer throughout the film. McQueen plays him with incredible composure, exuding absolute coolness at every moment. It is only in the final scene that it becomes clear what drives him and what he is after when he puts himself in such unnecessary danger. This kick, the adrenaline rush that rewards risks and crossing boundaries. The thrill of the forbidden. A life principle for him. The combination of skill and drive.

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His life was made for the cinema: born into a broken family in Indiana in 1930, his father was a gambler and stuntman who abandoned the family when the little boy was six months old, his mother was a nightclub dancer and drinker with various male acquaintances and little interest in raising children. He spent parts of his youth with a great-uncle and, after a bad-boy excursion into the street and gang milieu, in a home for children with difficult upbringing. He remained gratefully associated with the aid organisation California Junior Boys Republic for the rest of his life and supported it financially. This was probably the foundation for the melancholy that accompanied McQueen throughout his life: "If a small child doesn't get love, it wonders whether it is good enough. And since my mother didn't love me and I didn't have a father, that must have meant I was no good."

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Somehow he found his way into the military at the age of 17. He served in the Marines as a mechanic and tank driver. Because he had run away with a girlfriend without authorisation, he had to spend thirty days in the bunker. The first 21 days on bread and water. Afterwards, he was more disciplined.

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When it came down to it, he was a hero: during an exercise in the Arctic, his landing ship ran aground on a sandbank, several tanks and their crews slipped overboard onto the ice and collapsed. McQueen saved five comrades from drowning. As a reward, he was transferred to President Harry S. Truman's yacht as an honour guard. McQueen liked his time in the Marines. It was his therapy, he once said.

Then acting school. With no background or means, McQueen made it to the most famous of all acting schools, Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio in New York. Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul Newman had already trained here. He travelled there by hitchhiking due to lack of money. He never talked much about this time later.</p

In 1958, his first major role was as "Josh" in the US western series of the same name. McQueen played a gentleman bounty hunter who does his job without talking much, but shoots faster than his opponents with a shortened Winchester '92. Not particularly profound, but extremely popular. McQueen became known to the general public. The characteristic trait of the eloquent, taciturn character who pursues his goal honestly and straightforwardly: already strikingly created and successfully practised over three years of television series. Then perfected in the 1960s and 70s.

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The film The Magnificent Seven became his first global success in 1960. McQueen was clever on set and skilfully incorporated small, crowd-pleasing specials for his role as gunslinger Vin, which were not planned in the script. The international star Yul Brynner raged because this fidgeting supporting role stole the show. The fidgeting was worth it. This was followed by leading roles and major supporting roles in blockbusters.

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With The Great Escape in 1963, McQueen became a superstar. "If a film were ever made about my life," he said during filming, "that would be the title: The Great Escape."

McQueen became the perfect sex symbol. This cool guy with the sapphire blue eyes and penetrating gaze could be charming or boyish, then again a rebel with a charismatic and dangerous aura, plus his casual, laconic manner and melancholic elegance. The seductive power of the man idolised as the "manliest of all men" is not just an empty claim in the script.

He had affairs with Barbara Leigh, Jacqueline Bisset and Lauren Hutton and was married three times. With Neile Adams, Ali MacGraw and the model Barbara Minty. He was never really able to remain faithful. He said of himself that it was true that he was a chauvinist - but he didn't mind.

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His true love was cars and motorbikes - the film Le Mans was his passion project. Not only did he have previously unknown camera equipment developed for it, he even risked his marriage to actress Ali McGraw.

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Le Mans was to be the ultimate film about motor racing. Even the shooting turned into a nightmare, with the finished film flopping with critics and at the box office. A disaster that almost ruined McQueen financially and marked the end of his marriage. "Racing is life, the time between races is just waiting," he says in the film. A sentence that fits his films and his life in equal measure.

Much too early, at the age of fifty, Steve McQueen died on 7 November 1980 from two heart attacks as a result of his lung cancer. His heart stopped beating when he was operated on in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, for metastases in his stomach and lungs. He had inhaled far too much asbestos, either in the army or in his fireproof racing suits, and was also a heavy smoker.

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Of the dead of the dream factory, he is the most lively with his incredible coolness. Probably also because McQueen's anti-hero persona always had an undertone of strength and anger, melancholy and rebellion. Beneath the surface of his controlled style icon persona, you can sense how sensitive, restless and full of contradictions he was. Yet he remained eternally true to himself.

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In life and on the screen.

For the actor and director Gary Oldman, the common honouring of Steve McQueen as the "King of Cool" is far too trivial. In the documentary film I am Steve McQueen, which is well worth seeing, he explains: "There is cool - and there is Steve McQueen."