“…Hollywood’s king of cool … the reality behind the action man.
The posthumous “king of cool” is how Steve McQueen is routinely described by his fans today.
Thirty years after McQueen’s death, the reputation of the star of The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, Bullitt and The Getaway hasn’t been usurped by any of his successors.
No subsequent male lead has managed to be quite as cool as McQueen.
It’s not for want of trying.
From Die Hard onward, Bruce Willis has striven forlornly to emulate McQueen’s laconic screen image.
Kevin Costner clearly modelled his persona partly on that of the equally close-cropped and undemonstrative star.
Alec Baldwin was another McQueen pretender, even taking the star’s old role in an ill-fated remake of The Getaway.
But none has come close to McQueen’s mix of machismo and unflappability.
He was only 50 when he died of cancer.
Unlike Paul Newman or Robert Redford, he didn’t become crumpled with age … or take on the character roles that would diminish his original aura.
The irony is that McQueen really didn’t think he was a very good actor – one reason why he was so undemonstrative on screen.
“He always said he wasn’t an actor, he was a reactor.
By that he meant that he didn’t want to be lumbered with speaking plot.
He wasn’t sure he could do it,” the Briton Peter Yates, who worked with him on Bullitt, recalled.
McQueen’s solution was to pare down and down: to aim for the most minimalist style he could.
He is the antithesis to a star like James Cagney, who was in audiences’ faces …
… demanding their attention with his motor-mouthed delivery of dialogue and expressive physical gestures.
Nor, although he studied with Sanford Meisner (one of the top Method acting coaches) and effortlessly projected rebelliousness, does he have the soul-searching, neurotic quality of a Montgomery Clift or a James Dean.
He isn’t the monolithic John Wayne type either.
Actors who try to imitate him risk being dull.
They don’t have his eyes or intensity.
“Steve was the ultimate movie star.
He had what they refer to as the X-factor.
Well, it’s sex appeal, that’s what it is.
He had enormous sex appeal,” Robert Vaughan (his co-star in The Magnificent Seven) said of him.
McQueen was unusual among action stars in that he appealed equally strongly to male fans, who relished his feats of derring-do on motorbikes or in cars …
… and to women, who sensed a vulnerability behind the swaggering persona.
“I think it’s safe to say that it would have been impossible not to fall in love with Steve,” Ali McGraw, who began a turbulent love affair with McQueen during the making of The Getaway, recently told Vanity Fair.
For all his self-possession on screen, McQueen had a violent temper and a reputation as a rebel.
In his early roles, a sense of barely suppressed rage is always evident.
McQueen had been abandoned as a kid by his stunt-pilot father.
He was a troubled adolescent who often fell foul of the law, fought with his stepfather and spent time in reform school.
His time in the marines taught him the restraint and discipline he always seemed to convey in movies…”
go to source/story>>>The real Steve McQueen - Features, Films - The Independent
