Steve McQueen
In the 1960s, this PROVOKR Icon was the “King of Cool”
“It would have been impossible not to fall in love with Steve,” said Ali MacGraw, who became weak-kneed over McQueen while co-starring with him in the 1972 action flick The Getaway. (They would later marry.) For much of the 1960s, McQueen had that kind of effect on everyone. Although he rarely strayed from his tough-guy persona, his macho charisma was unmatched. Coming from a hardscrabble youth—a juvenile crime spree got him locked up in a reform school—McQueen brought a hypermasculine intensity to the screen. He also had one of the greatest movie faces of all time: A granite jaw, an angelic face slightly weathered by hard living, and, to top it off, a pair of hypnotic blue eyes.
Men idolized him because he was the ultimate guy’s guy—his love for fast cars and motorcycles translated into adrenaline-pumping chase scenes in movies like The Great Escape (1963) and Bullitt (1965). And women adored him because he was the epitome of the bad boy lover in such movies as Love With the Proper Stranger (1963), canoodling with Natalie Wood; The Cincinnati Kid (1965), opposite Ann-Margret; and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), facing off against Faye Dunaway. He came off as the aloof, unsentimental cool cat he was in real life. On the set of the 1962 movie Hell Is for Heroes, director Don Siegel tried to get McQueen to cry during a tragic scene by using everything from onions to slapping McQueen across the face. No dice.
Ultimately, McQueen—who died of cancer at age 50—was one of those rare Hollywood stars who was basically an average Joe with extraordinary drive who somehow found himself as the most popular actor in Tinseltown. He summed up his regular-guy-in-a-strange-land journey best when he told Life magazine, “I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.”
