The blogosphere is awash with paens to Steve McQueen as an icon of cool. Why is Steve McQueen such an important figurehead for (mostly) blokes who like cars and motorbikes. It can’t be just about how good he looked, can it?<\/p>\n
He had a hard life. You’ve probably heard all about it before. The absent father. The Alcoholic mother. \u00a0He suffered struggles in education and run-ins with violent street gangs. He spent his youth hanging out with a coterie of whores, oilmen, lumberjacks and circus performers before landing himself a gig in the Korean-war era US Marine Corps. In a prescient echo of his performance in The Great Escape, he spent time in the brig for going AWOL, before stepping up to the plate and embracing the life of a military man and eventually distinguishing himself.<\/p>\n
The 20 year old McQueen was honourably discharged from the \u00a0Marine Corps in 1950 and straight away began to study acting in New York. At the weekends he would race motorbikes \u2013 and according to various sources he was so successful that he was able to live off the prize money to fund his drama training.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t until 1957, however, that landed his big break playing a tough, taciturn bounty hunter in a network series called Wanted: Dead or Alive<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>He went on to make his name for \u00a0brilliantly studied performances \u2013 often playing marginal mavericks who managed to see to the heart of a situation \u2013 and, crucially \u2013 were able to act on that intuition to a certain blend of stylish triumph.<\/p>\n Throughout the sixties McQueen came to exemplify the complex and contradictory vision of manhood than many men share: one where the dark and the light co-exist and complement each other. An essence of the characters he played \u2013 from the steely PI in Bullitt <\/a>to the American GT usurper in Le Mans and everything in between, shone through to his daily life.<\/p>\n\n\t\t