Steve McQueen

• 1. Introduction

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  Steve McQueen checked into a small clinic in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in late October 1980 and signed in as Samuel Sheppard. The doctors and staff had no idea who their patient really was. Beyond that clinic, he was one of the best-known faces in American film. He had come for an operation that his American doctors had warned he might not survive. Early the next month he was dead at the age of 50, after a heart attack that followed the surgery.

  Born Terrence Stephen McQueen, he spent his life moving toward risk, on motorcycles, in race cars and on film sets. Yet the story starts far from any of that, with a child who was passed between relatives and never seemed to belong anywhere. How does someone with that start become the man the press nicknamed the King of Cool? Why would a star who could demand almost any salary turn down some of the most famous roles of his era? And how did a man with money and fame end up in a Mexican clinic under a false name?

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• 2. A Boy Without a Home

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  Steve McQueen was born on the 24th of March 1930 at St. Francis Hospital in Beech Grove, Indiana. His father, William McQueen, flew stunts for a flying circus and abandoned the family when the boy was six months old. His mother, Julia Ann Crawford, found motherhood too hard to manage, and several biographers say she drank heavily. In 1933 she left the boy with her parents, Lillian and Victor, in Slater, Missouri.

  A red tricycle from his great-uncle Claude marked McQueen's fourth birthday, and he later said it sparked his love of racing. As the Great Depression worsened, the boy and his grandparents moved in with Claude and his family on their farm in Slater. McQueen remembered those years fondly. He called Claude "very good, very strong, and very fair" and said he learned a lot from him.

  At eight, McQueen was collected by his mother, who had remarried, and taken to Indianapolis. Claude sent him off with a gold pocket watch. Inside the case was an inscription: "To Steve, who has been a son to me." The new life fit badly. McQueen was dyslexic and partly deaf after a childhood ear infection, and school went poorly. His stepfather beat him so severely that at nine he left home and lived on the streets. Years later McQueen reflected, "When a kid doesn't have any love when he's small, he begins to wonder if he's good enough."

  When McQueen was 12, his mother wrote to Claude asking for him back, this time in Los Angeles, where she lived with a second husband. By McQueen's own account, he and the new stepfather "locked horns immediately." The man was willing to beat both the boy and his mother. McQueen rebelled and was sent back to Claude for the last time. At 14 he left the farm without a goodbye and briefly joined a circus. He then drifted to his mother's home in Los Angeles and returned to gang life and petty crime.

  The police caught him stealing hubcaps and handed him to his stepfather, who beat him badly and threw him down a flight of stairs. From the bottom, McQueen looked up and said, "You lay your stinking hands on me again and I swear I'll kill you." Soon afterward the stepfather persuaded his mother to sign a court order calling the boy incorrigible. The order sent him to the California Junior Boys Republic in Chino Hills.

  At the Boys Republic, the other boys had little patience for him at first. If one boy in a bungalow skipped his chores, everyone could lose the monthly bus ride into town to see a movie. McQueen admitted he paid his dues with the others many times and took his lumps. Gradually he matured, became a role model and was elected to the Boys Council, which set the rules of daily life there. He left at 16. As a famous actor he came back regularly to talk with the boys and kept ties to the place for life. When he signed for films, he also demanded odd free goods in bulk, such as electric razors and jeans. It was later discovered that he gave them all to the Boys Republic.

  At 16, McQueen moved in with his mother again, now in New York's Greenwich Village. Two Merchant Marine sailors he met there persuaded him to sign onto a ship bound for the Dominican Republic. He quit the ship on arrival and eventually found work at a brothel. Later he drifted through Texas, selling pens at a traveling carnival, and worked as a lumberjack in Canada. An arrest for vagrancy in the Deep South earned him 30 days on a chain gang.

  In 1947 McQueen enlisted in the U.S. Marines, with his mother's permission because he was not yet 18. Boot camp took place at Parris Island, South Carolina. He rose to private first class in an armored unit but chafed at discipline. "I was busted back down to private about seven times," he later said. After a weekend pass expired, he stayed away for two weeks with his girlfriend, Barbara Ross, until the shore patrol found him. He resisted arrest and got 41 days in the brig.

  That sentence changed him. He resolved to improve himself and embraced Marine discipline. During an Arctic exercise he pulled five Marines out of a tank just before it broke through ice into the sea. He was assigned to the honor guard on USS Williamsburg, the presidential yacht of Harry S. Truman, and he was honorably discharged in 1950. "The Marines made a man out of me," he said. "I learned how to get along with others, and I had a platform to jump off." Within two years, the G.I. Bill would pay his tuition at an acting school in New York.

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• 3. Hunger for the Stage

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  "Alts iz farloyrn," Yiddish for "All is lost," was reportedly the first line Steve McQueen ever spoke on a stage. It came in a 1952 play produced by the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon. That year, with help from the G.I. Bill, he began studying at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse and at HB Studio under Uta Hagen. He also took classes with Stella Adler.

  Long Island City Raceway gave him a second income. McQueen bought a Harley-Davidson and a Triumph, the first of many motorcycles, and entered weekend races. He became good enough to win about $100 each weekend. During the 1953-1954 season he also appeared as a musical judge on the ABC show Jukebox Jury.

  Stage work came slowly. He took minor roles in Peg o' My Heart, The Member of the Wedding and Two Fingers of Pride. In 1955 he made his Broadway debut in A Hatful of Rain, a play starring Ben Gazzara. Late that year he left New York for Los Angeles and rented a house on Vestal Avenue in Echo Park, hoping for work in Hollywood.

  A two-part Westinghouse Studio One television production called The Defender caught the attention of the manager Hilly Elkins. Elkins decided B movies were the place for his young client to make a mark. McQueen's first film job under Elkins was a bit part in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), directed by Robert Wise and starring Paul Newman. Next came Never Love a Stranger, The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery in 1959 and The Blob, his first leading role.

  Television made him known. He played Bill Longley on the NBC Western Tales of Wells Fargo, starring Dale Robertson. Elkins then pushed Vincent M. Fennelly, producer of the Western Trackdown, to let McQueen read for the bounty hunter Josh Randall. In 1958 McQueen appeared in Season 1, Episode 21, opposite series lead Robert Culp, an old New York motorcycle racing buddy. In Episode 31 he played twin brothers, one of them an outlaw hunted by Culp's character, Hoby Gilman.

  In September 1958 CBS aired a pilot for a spin-off, Wanted Dead or Alive. Years later, in interviews tied to its DVD release, Culp claimed credit for bringing McQueen to Hollywood and winning him the part. He said he taught McQueen the art of the fast draw, and by the second day of filming McQueen was beating him at it.

  Randall carried a sawed-off .44-40 Winchester rifle, nicknamed the "Mare's Leg," in a special holster instead of the usual six-gun. The cartridges in his gunbelt were dummy .45-70 rounds, picked because they "looked tougher." The bounty hunter's unsavory reputation fed an antihero image, full of mystery and detachment, that set the show apart from other TV Westerns. The series ran 94 episodes, from 1958 into early 1961. Much of its outdoor action was shot at the Iverson Movie Ranch in Chatsworth.

  At 29, McQueen got a movie break because of a quarrel he had nothing to do with. Frank Sinatra removed Sammy Davis Jr. from Never So Few after Davis supposedly made mildly critical remarks about Sinatra in a radio interview. Davis's part went to McQueen. Sinatra saw something special in the newcomer and made sure he got plenty of closeups. McQueen's character, Bill Ringa, was most at ease driving a Jeep at high speed or handling a switchblade or a tommy gun. The picture's director, John Sturges, would soon hire him again.

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• 4. Scene Stealer

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  When John Sturges cast McQueen in The Magnificent Seven in 1960, he promised to "give him the camera." McQueen played Vin Tanner alongside Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz and James Coburn. It became his first major hit and led him to leave Wanted Dead or Alive.

  McQueen turned a quiet supporting role into a scene-stealing one. He shook his shotgun shells beside his ear before loading, kept checking his gun in the background of other people's shots and wiped the rim of his hat. Top-billed Brynner was annoyed and protested that McQueen was stealing scenes. Wallach wrote in his autobiography that he struggled to hide his amusement while watching the funeral procession scene where the two characters first meet. Brynner was furious about the shell twirl, and he refused to draw his gun in that scene, knowing McQueen's character would likely outdraw him.

  In 1963 McQueen got top billing in Sturges's next big picture, The Great Escape. It was Hollywood's fictional version of a real mass escape from the World War II prisoner camp Stalag Luft III. Insurance worries kept McQueen from the famous motorcycle leap. His friend and fellow cycle fan Bud Ekins, who looked like him from a distance, did it instead. When Johnny Carson congratulated McQueen on the jump during The Tonight Show, McQueen set him straight: "It wasn't me. That was Bud Ekins." The film established his box-office pull and his place as a superstar.

  Natalie Wood costarred with him in Love with the Proper Stranger, also in 1963. He then played the title role in Nevada Smith, a character from Harold Robbins' novel The Carpetbaggers, whom Alan Ladd had played two years earlier. The Western, with Karl Malden and Suzanne Pleshette, proved enormously successful. McQueen played a poker player in The Cincinnati Kid in 1965. For The Sand Pebbles, in which he was an engine room sailor, he earned his only Academy Award nomination, in 1966. Richard Crenna, Candice Bergen and Richard Attenborough costarred.

  Bullitt arrived in 1968 and became one of his best-known films and his personal favorite. Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Vaughn and Don Gordon costarred. Its car chase through San Francisco was unprecedented and has been imitated ever since. McQueen drove for roughly 10 percent of what appears on screen, mostly in closeups. Stunt drivers Bud Ekins and Loren Janes handled the rest of his driving. The veteran stunt driver Bill Hickman drove the black Dodge Charger R/T 440 that played the hitmen's car. McQueen's character drove a Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang GT 390. All three drivers spent several days practicing high-speed driving in tight quarters before filming. The picture ran so far over budget that Warner Bros. canceled his contract for his remaining seven films.

  Bullitt's success sent Warner Bros. back to woo him, but McQueen refused. His next film came from an independent studio and was released by United Artists. In The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968 he changed his image, playing a debonair, wealthy executive opposite Faye Dunaway. He then signed a deal with Cinema Center Films to star in and produce movies. In 1969 he made the Southern period piece The Reivers, based on a William Faulkner novel.

  Le Mans, a 1971 racing drama, got mixed reviews. A year later came Junior Bonner, about an aging rodeo rider. In The Getaway, again with director Sam Peckinpah, he met his future wife Ali MacGraw. By then he was the world's highest-paid actor. In 1973 he played a prisoner on Devil's Island in Papillon, with Dustin Hoffman as his tragic companion.

  The Towering Inferno in 1974 paired him with Paul Newman under director John Guillermin. McQueen was first offered the architect but asked to play the fire chief, which he thought was showier. Newman took the architect, who had more lines, so McQueen asked for more dialogue to balance it. His pay was $1,000,000 plus a share of the gross, and he insisted on doing his own stunts. The film grossed $55,000,000 in North America.

  Then McQueen vanished from public view. He spent his time on motorcycle racing, roaming the country in a motor home and on vintage Indian motorcycles. He did not act again until 1978, when An Enemy of the People cast him against type as a bearded, bespectacled 19th-century doctor in an adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play. It never got a proper theatrical release and has turned up only occasionally on PBS.

  Both of his last films came out in 1980 and were loosely based on true stories. Tom Horn was a Western about a former Army scout turned hired gunman who hunts rustlers for big cattle ranchers and is later hanged for murder. The Hunter, set in the modern city, cast him as a bounty hunter once more.

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• 5. The Ones That Got Away

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  Breakfast at Tiffany's wanted McQueen for its male lead, but his Wanted: Dead or Alive contract blocked him. It was the first of a long list of famous parts he missed. He turned down Ocean's 11, The Driver, Apocalypse Now, California Split, Dirty Harry and A Bridge Too Far. He also passed on The French Connection because he did not want to play another cop. He refused Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because the lawyers and agents for him and Paul Newman could not agree on who got top billing.

  Grand Prix offers a messier story. Director John Frankenheimer wanted McQueen for Pete Aron, an American Formula One driver. Unable to meet him personally, Frankenheimer sent his business partner, the producer Edward Lewis. The two clashed instantly and the meeting was a disaster. The part went to James Garner.

  Garner recalled that McQueen was then in Taiwan on The Sand Pebbles, which ran about a year longer than planned. Garner phoned him there to say he was taking the role. By Garner's account, there was "about a twenty dollar silence" before McQueen replied, "if anybody's gonna do it, I'm glad, you're doin' it." Even though the two were next-door neighbors, McQueen did not speak to him for about a year and a half. In the end McQueen's son, Chad, made him take the boy to see Grand Prix, and the two men started talking again.

  Steven Spielberg wanted McQueen for Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg met him at a bar, where McQueen drank one beer after another. Before leaving, McQueen said he could not take the role because he was unable to cry on cue. Spielberg offered to cut the crying scene, but McQueen demurred, saying it was the best scene in the script. Richard Dreyfuss got the part.

  William Friedkin wanted McQueen as the lead in Sorcerer in 1977, a film to be shot mostly in the Dominican Republic. McQueen did not want to be apart from Ali MacGraw for the shoot and asked that she be made a producer so she could be on set. Friedkin refused and cast Roy Scheider. He later said that not landing McQueen hurt the film's box-office performance.

  Spy novelist Jeremy Duns revealed that McQueen had been considered for a film of The Diamond Smugglers, written by Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. He would have played John Blaize, a secret agent who goes undercover to break up a diamond-smuggling ring in South Africa. Complications shelved the project, though a 1964 screenplay survives.

  In 1977 McQueen and Barbra Streisand were tentatively cast in The Gauntlet, but they could not get along and both withdrew. One biographer says they had briefly dated in 1971. Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke took the leads. When David Morrell's novel First Blood appeared in 1972, McQueen showed interest in the Rambo character, but the producers rejected him as too old.

  The Bodyguard was offered to him in 1976, with Diana Ross attached to costar. It was not made until 1992, with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston. Quigley Down Under had been in development since 1974, with McQueen under consideration. By the time production started in 1980, he was ill. The project was shelved until Tom Selleck starred a decade later.

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• 6. Machines and Speed

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  In 1961 McQueen drove a BMC Mini at Brands Hatch in the British Touring Car Championship and finished third. It was a one-off outing, but he considered becoming a professional race car driver. His best result came at the 1970 12 Hours of Sebring. Driving with a cast on his left foot from a motorcycle accident two weeks earlier, he shared a Porsche 908/02 with Peter Revson and won the three-litre class. They missed the overall victory by 21.1 seconds. The winners were Mario Andretti, Ignazio Giunti and Nino Vaccarella in a five-litre Ferrari 512S.

  That same Porsche 908 was later entered by his production company, Solar Productions, as a camera car for the 1970 24 Hours of Le Mans. McQueen wanted to drive a Porsche 917 in the race with Jackie Stewart, but the film's backers threatened to pull their support if he did. He had to choose between 24 hours of racing and a whole summer of filming. He chose the film. He also had to decline a seat in a Triumph 2500 PI for the British Leyland team in the 1970 London-Mexico rally because of movie commitments.

  Off-road, McQueen raced under the alias Harvey Mushman, often on a BSA Hornet. His first dirt bike, a 500 cc Triumph, came from Bud Ekins. He entered major West Coast events, including the Baja 1000, the Mint 400 and the Elsinore Grand Prix. In 1964 he and Ekins joined the first official U.S. entry in the Silver Vase category of the International Six Days Trial, held that year in Erfurt, East Germany. The team had four riders plus a reserve.

  The American riders reached England in late August to collect their 649 cc and 490 cc Triumph twins and modify them for off-road use. A long-established English dealer let down the team on transport, so the Triumph dealer H&L Motors found them a suitable vehicle. In Germany they discovered that a Vase "B" team of expatriate Americans had entered privately on European machines. McQueen carried number 278, based on the starting order. Both teams crashed repeatedly. McQueen retired on day three with irreparable crash damage, the same day Ekins withdrew with a broken leg. Only one member of the "B" team finished. Motorcycle Sport magazine said the Americans "rode everywhere with great dash, if not in admirable style."

  Honors followed. McQueen entered the Off-road Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1978. In 1971 Solar Productions funded the motorcycle documentary On Any Sunday, in which he appears with the racing legends Mert Lawwill and Malcolm Smith. That year he also appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated riding a Husqvarna dirt bike. A patent was issued in 1971 for a motorsports bucket seat he designed. For a segment filmed for The Ed Sullivan Show, he drove Sullivan at speed around a desert in a dune buggy, and the host called it a "helluva" ride.

  On screen, McQueen did many of his own stunts, including some of the Bullitt car chases. In The Great Escape he rode a 650 cc Triumph TR6 Trophy for a good deal of screen time. Skilled riders were hard to find, so editing shows him in a German uniform chasing himself on a second bike.

  His son Chad testified that Steve owned around 100 classic motorcycles and about 100 exotic and vintage cars. Among them were the Porsche 917, Porsche 908 and Ferrari 512 race cars from Le Mans. There was also a 1953 Siata 208s, on which he swapped the Siata badges for Ferrari ones and called it his "little Ferrari." A 1958 GMC pickup carried the tag MQ3188, the ID number assigned to him in reform school. He gave the same number, N3188, to his 1945 Stearman biplane. His 1952 Chevrolet camper truck was the last vehicle he rode in before his death.

  He also flew a 1946 Piper J-3 Cub and an award-winning 1931 Pitcairn PA-8 biplane, once flown by World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker in the U.S. Mail Service. The aircraft were kept at Santa Paula Airport, an hour northwest of Hollywood, where he lived out his final days.

  The Bullitt Mustang proved the one car he could never get. He tried many times to buy the GT 390 because its modified drivetrain suited his driving. Of the two Mustangs used in the film, one was badly damaged and judged beyond repair. It was believed scrapped until it surfaced in Mexico in 2017. McQueen tried to buy the other in 1977, and it has since stayed out of public view. Its hero-car counterpart later sold at Mecum's Kissimmee auction in January 2020 for $3.4 million, or $3.74 million with commissions and fees.

  Other pieces of the collection found new owners at auction. His 1963 metallic-brown Ferrari 250 GT Lusso Berlinetta sold for $2.31 million on the 16th of August 2007. Porsche 917 chassis 022, used extensively in Le Mans, was restored for Jerry Seinfeld. When Mecum offered it on the 18th of January 2025, the final bid of $25 million fell short of the undisclosed reserve. His 1956 Jaguar XKSS, in drivable condition, is displayed at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, and Jay Leno once drove it on Jay Leno's Garage.

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• 7. Private Life and Public Habits

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  Two months after Charles Manson incited the Tate murders, the media reported that police had found a hit list bearing McQueen's name. Two of the victims, Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, were his friends. According to his first wife, McQueen began carrying a handgun in public at all times, even at Sebring's funeral.

  His daily routine was punishing. He followed a two-hour exercise regimen of weightlifting and, at one point, ran 5 miles a day, seven days a week. He learned the martial art Tang Soo Do from Pat E. Johnson, a ninth-degree black belt. His vices were just as real. The photographer William Claxton said McQueen smoked marijuana almost every day, and the biographer Marc Eliot said he used a lot of cocaine in the early 1970s. He was also a heavy cigarette smoker and sometimes drank to excess. In 1972 he was arrested for driving while intoxicated in Anchorage, Alaska.

  He also held a surprising set of political loyalties. Though a registered Republican, he supported the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. In 1968 he went back to backing the Republican Richard Nixon.

  In New York, while studying with Stella Adler, McQueen dated the British-American actress Gia Scala. On the 2nd of November 1956 he married the Filipina actress and dancer Neile Adams. They had a daughter, Terry Leslie, born on the 5th of June 1959, and a son, Chad, born on the 28th of December 1960. Terry died on the 19th of March 1998 and Chad on the 11th of September 2024. McQueen and Adams divorced on the 14th of March 1972. Chad became an actor and race car driver like his father.

  Two of McQueen's four grandchildren followed him into entertainment. Steven R. McQueen, Chad's son, is an actor. Molly McQueen, Terry's daughter, is an actress and producer.

  On the 12th of July 1973 McQueen married his Getaway costar Ali MacGraw in Cheyenne, Wyoming. They divorced on the 9th of August 1978. MacGraw suffered a miscarriage during the marriage. His closest friend in his last years, the martial-arts master Pat Johnson, called her the one true love of McQueen's life. "He was madly in love with her until the day he died," Johnson said. In 1973 McQueen served as one of the pallbearers at Bruce Lee's funeral, alongside James Coburn, Lee's brother Robert, Peter Chin, Dan Inosanto and Taky Kimura.

  James Garner's tidy yard became a target for McQueen's sense of humor. As McQueen told it, he noticed the flowers trimmed, no papers lying around and the grass always cut. "So to piss him off," he said, he lobbed empty beer cans down the hill into Garner's driveway. Garner would leave with everything spotless and come home to the mess. McQueen said it took him a long time to work out who was responsible.

  On the 16th of January 1980, less than 10 months before his death, McQueen married the fashion model Barbara Minty. In her book Steve McQueen: The Last Mile, she wrote that he became an evangelical Christian late in life, though he had been raised Catholic. She credited his flying instructor Sammy Mason, Mason's son Pete, and herself. McQueen attended the Ventura Missionary Church. The evangelist Billy Graham visited him shortly before he died.

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• 8. Illness and Afterlife

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  A persistent cough began in early 1978. McQueen quit cigarettes and took antibiotics, but nothing helped, and his breathlessness worsened. On the 22nd of December 1979, after he finished filming The Hunter, a biopsy revealed pleural mesothelioma. The cancer is linked to asbestos exposure and has no known cure.

  McQueen later gave a medical interview in which he blamed asbestos. He suspected sound stage insulation and the protective suits and helmets worn by racing drivers. He thought it far more likely, however, that the cause was heavy exposure while stripping asbestos insulation from pipes on a troop ship during his Marine service.

  By February 1980, doctors found the cancer had spread widely. McQueen tried to keep it secret, but on the 11th of March 1980 the National Enquirer reported that he had "terminal cancer." In July, after American doctors said they could not extend his life, he went to Rosarito Beach, Mexico, for unconventional treatment. The trip caused controversy because his doctor there was William Donald Kelley, widely regarded as a quack.

  Kelley promoted a variation on the Gerson therapy. It involved coffee enemas, frequent washing with shampoos, daily injections of fluid containing live cells from cattle and sheep, and massages. It also used laetrile, a reputed anti-cancer drug sold in Mexico that was long known to be toxic and ineffective. Kelley's only medical-related license, until it was revoked in 1976, had been in orthodontics, a branch of dentistry.

  McQueen paid cash for the treatments, said to run upward of $40,000 a month during a three-month stay. The tabloid and traditional press reacted with a sensation once they learned who the patient was. He returned to the United States in early October. Kelley announced publicly that McQueen would be cured completely and could resume normal life. Instead, his condition worsened, and huge tumors grew in his abdomen.

  In late October he flew to Ciudad Juárez to have an abdominal tumor on his liver removed. It weighed around 5 pounds, or 2.3 kilograms. McQueen died at 3:45 a.m. on the 7th of November 1980-12 hours after surgery to remove or shrink many tumors in his neck and abdomen. He reportedly died in his sleep with his family at his bedside. Leonard DeWitt of the Ventura Missionary Church presided over the memorial service. McQueen was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

  In 1986 he received a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Motorcycle Hall of Fame inducted him in November 1999, crediting his support for off-road riders and his boost to motorcycling's public image. In April 2007 the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum added him to its Hall of Great Western Performers. That year Forbes reported that he remained popular and ranked among the highest-earning dead celebrities. A rights-management executive credited the Branded Entertainment Network, then called Corbis, with keeping the estate profitable by limiting licensing of his image. The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization honored him with the Warren Zevon Tribute Award in 2012.

  His hometown has marked him too. On the 16th of March 2010 the public library in Beech Grove, Indiana, dedicated the Steve McQueen Birthplace Collection, marking the 80th anniversary of his birth. A street in San Antonio, Texas, carries his name. The Academy Film Archive holds the Steve McQueen-Neile Adams Collection of personal prints and home movies.

  Film has kept returning to him. The 2015 documentary Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans follows his effort to create and star in Le Mans, with interviews from Chad McQueen and Neile Adams. Steve McQueen - American Icon, about his life and spiritual search, played in some theaters on the 28th of September 2017. In Quentin Tarantino's 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Damian Lewis plays him, and he also appears as a character in Tarantino's novel of the same name.

  Ford has used his image for cars. In 1998 director Paul Street made a Ford Puma commercial in San Francisco, set to the Bullitt theme. Archive footage of McQueen was digitally placed behind the wheel. At the Detroit Auto Show in January 2018, Ford unveiled the 2019 Mustang Bullitt. Molly McQueen made the announcement, and a short film showed her meeting the actual 1968 Bullitt Mustang Fastback, which was then driven out to fanfare.

  His wristwear and eyewear became collectibles. For Le Mans he bought six identical blue-faced Heuer Monaco watches. One of two still in private hands sold at a Phillips auction in New York on the 12th of December 2020 for a record $2.208 million, the most ever paid for a Heuer. The blue-tinted sunglasses he wore in The Thomas Crown Affair sold in Los Angeles in 2006 for $70,200, and the maker still sells the Persol 714 model named for him. His Rolex Submariner Reference 5512 sold for $234,000 in 2009, yet a second Submariner pulled from a Phillips sale in 2018 raised doubts that he had ever worn it.

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