Among all the brilliant leading men of his generation, Steve McQueen was like a rough-cut diamond: raw, enigmatic, cold to the touch. Before he emerged as the King of Cool, stealing scenes in 1960's "The Magnificent Seven," McQueen was a delinquent and drifter, stealing hubcaps and doing time at a California reform school. His troubled early years and bedroom-eyed handsomeness made him a natural for the role of the rebel — both onscreen and off. In 1958, he landed a part as a bounty hunter on TV's "Wanted: Dead or Alive" and soon moved to film. That tough persona perfectly suited the turmoil of the times: skeptical, resolute, self-possessed, and unflappable, whether executing the greatest car-chase scene ever in "Bullitt" (1968) or seducing a formidable Faye Dunaway in "The Thomas Crown Affair" (also 1968). Few were able to crack that veneer, but in 1963, LIFE's John Dominis captured McQueen's warm, domesticated side, at home with his first wife, actress Neile Adams, and his children.
By the 1970s, the hard-living McQueen was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood and remarried to '70s "It Girl" Ali MacGraw. He also had a reputation for being "difficult," although he wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Many of his best films — "The Great Escape" (1963), "The Getaway" (1972), "Papillion" (1973) — chronicle pursuits and escapes, the ideal métier for an actor who never outgrew his teenaged restlessness or his passion for fast cars. McQueen's 1980 death from mesotheliomic cancer came as a shock: He was only 50 and always seemed indestructible. But his cinematic legacy, a sleek, understated, laconic masculinity, endures. —Jeff Ousborne
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