What made McQueen a pin-up was his sullen moodiness

On this day in 1980 — 40 years ago — the actor Steve McQueen, one of Hollywood’s leading men of the 1960s and 1970s, died at the age of 50 in Mexico, where he was undergoing an experimental treatment for cancer.

In 1979, McQueen had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a type of cancer often related to asbestos exposure. It was later believed that the ruggedly handsome actor, who had an affinity for fast cars and motorcycles, might have been exposed to asbestos by wearing racing suits.

McQueen was born on March 24, 1930, in Beech Grove, Indiana. After a troubled youth that included time in reform school, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps in the late 1940s. He then studied acting and began competing in motorcycle races.

McQueen made his feature film debut with a tiny role in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me starring Paul Newman. He went on to appear in the camp classic, The Blob (1958), and gained fame playing a bounty hunter in the TV series, Wanted: Dead or Alive, which originally aired on CBS from 1958 to 1961.

During the 1960s, McQueen built a reputation for playing cool, loner heroes in a list of films that included The Magnificent Seven (1960), which was directed by John Sturges and also featured Yul Brynner and Charles Bronson; The Great Escape (1963), in which McQueen played a U.S. solider in World War II who makes a daring motorcycle escape from a German prison camp; and The Sand Pebbles (1966), a war epic for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination.

McQueen played a detective in one of his most popular movies, 1968’s Bullitt, which featured a spectacular car chase through the streets of San Francisco. That same year, the actor portrayed an elegant thief in The Thomas Crown Affair.

In the 1970s, McQueen was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors and starred in hit films such as director Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972) with Ali MacGraw, to whom McQueen was married from 1973 to 1978; Papillon (1973), with Dustin Hoffman; and The Towering Inferno (1974), with Paul Newman, William Holden and Faye Dunaway.

In the summer of 1980, McQueen traveled to Rosarito Beach, Mexico, where he underwent an unorthodox cancer treatment that involved, among other things, coffee enemas and a therapy derived from apricot pits.

On November 6, 1980, he had surgery to remove cancerous masses from his body. He died the following day.

His final films were, Tom Horn and The Hunter, both of which were released in 1980.

Because of the occasion, this is a photograph about photography, and it contains a veritable museum of gadgets that look neolithically clunky in our digital age. One man wields the kind of flash bulb used by paparazzi to stun their prey; another holds up a movie camera that looks as if it might have had to be cranked by hand; others wear an additional eye on their chests, and peer at the viewfinder as if into upside-down periscopes.

It’s also a photograph about the fickleness of the camera’s roving gaze, since no one but whoever took this snap has any interest in McQueen. In 1966 he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in as a sailor The Sand Pebbles, and in 1968 he made Bullitt, unforgettably bouncing a cop car down the steeply terraced streets of San Francisco, but in 1967 his wattage had temporarily dimmed. The scrum of photographers ignores him to concentrate on some unseen A-lister who parades past just outside the frame.

Disarmingly, he can’t have known that he was being photographed. Otherwise he would surely have closed that goofily gaping mouth, or at least treated us to an orthodontic display like his wife’s. What made McQueen a pin-up was his sullen moodiness. He glowered as he stood beside the motorcycle on which he vaulted over the concentration camp fence in The Great Escape, scowled as he showed off Bullitt’s shoulder holster, and unrepentantly stared back at the police photographer in a mug shot after his arrest in Alaska for drunken driving in 1973. Here he looks almost gormless, wondering at some mid-air spectacle we can’t see – an absence as intriguing as that of the brighter star who monopolises the attentions of the photographers behind him.

Even his wife – to whose pretty head McQueen later held a gun, to punish her for a one-night stand with Maximilian Schell – looks genuinely enraptured. They might be watching the mother ship that opens its doors to admit a few fortunate earthlings at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Maybe there actually is a heaven; meanwhile we have to make do with Hollywood.

PROC. BY MOVIES