Steve McQueen

<p>Terrence Stephen McQueen was born on March 24, 1930, in Beech Grove, Indiana. Abandoned by his stunt-pilot father in infancy and neglected by an alcoholic mother, McQueen spent a tumultuous youth running with street gangs and was remanded to the California Junior Republic reform school in Chino. At age seventeen, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, where he distinguished himself by rescuing five fellow Marines from drowning during an Arctic exercise in Newfoundland.</p><p>In 1952, using GI Bill funding, McQueen studied acting in New York at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse and was one of only two students accepted out of two thousand applicants into Lee Strasberg's prestigious Actors Studio. Breakthrough stardom arrived on television as the sawed-off Winchester bounty hunter Josh Randall in <em>Wanted: Dead or Alive</em> (1958–1961).</p><p>McQueen exploded into international film stardom in John Sturges' <em>The Magnificent Seven</em> (1960) and <em>The Great Escape</em> (1963), where his iconic barbed-wire motorcycle jump captured the world's imagination. In 1968, as San Francisco detective Frank Bullitt in <em>Bullitt</em>, McQueen set the permanent gold standard for cinematic car chases in his Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang GT 390. He earned an Academy Award nomination for <em>The Sand Pebbles</em> (1966) and critical acclaim in <em>The Thomas Crown Affair</em> (1968) and <em>Papillon</em> (1973). A world-class professional motorsport racer who finished second overall in the 1970 12 Hours of Sebring, McQueen died on November 7, 1980, in Juárez, Mexico, from mesothelioma caused by asbestos exposure during his Marine Corps naval service, leaving behind an immortal legacy of rugged coolness and cinematic rebellion.</p>