As a new biography of Steve McQueen emerges this week, LIFE.com shares photos of the actor published for the first time this year.
Three Weeks in Steve McQueen's World
In the spring of 1963, Steve McQueen was on the brink of superstardom. Intrigued by the breakout star of The Magnificent Seven, LIFE sent photographer John Dominis to California to hang out with the 33-year-old actor. Pictured: At his home in Palm Springs, McQueen practices his aim before heading out for a shooting session in the desert.
Photograph by John Dominis/TIME & LIFE Pictures.
Steve and Neile, Hand in Hand
After laying down their firearms, the couple takes a stroll. At this point the McQueens had been married for seven years and had two children, but the spark between them seemed very much alive, the photographer told his editors.
CREDIT: John Dominis/TIME & LIFE Pictures.
A Dance With Neile
"They were always necking!" photographer Dominis said of McQueen and his wife in '63. (They divorced nine years later, and the actor remarried twice). "They chase each other around," he wrote, "as though it were going out of style."
John Dominis/TIME & LIFE Pictures.
A Cuddle, a Laugh
Neile and Steve lounge on the patio by the pool at their Palm Springs bungalow. "With strangers, I can't breathe.... But I dig my old lady," he told LIFE.
CREDIT:
John Dominis/TIME & LIFE Pictures.
Inside His Hollywood Home
McQueen takes a call in the living room of his eclectic home in Hollywood. "Man, if I didn't make my own scene, I could have wound up a hood instead of an actor," he told LIFE at the time, reflecting on a rough-and-tumble past that included a stint in a school for problem kids and 41 days in the brig for going AWOL while in the Marines.
CREDIT: John Dominis/TIME & LIFE Pictures.
McQueen in His Jaguar XKSS
Trailing Steve McQueen was Dominis' first Hollywood gig. He got the assignment because he and McQueen shared one vital passion point. "When I was living in Hong Kong I had a sports car and I raced it," Dominis told LIFE.com. "And I knew that Steve McQueen had a racing car. I rented one anticipating that we might do something with them. He was in a motorcycle race out in the desert, so I went out there in my car and met him, and I say, 'You wanna try my car?'" Later the two of them would zip around Los Angeles, including Sunset Boulevard (pictured).
CREDIT: John Dominis/TIME & LIFE Pictures.
Kicking Back With a Smoke, a Beer, and a Good Friend
At the beginning of the LIFE shoot, McQueen participated in a 500-mile, two-day dirt-bike race across the Mojave Desert. "These people are not the wild motorcycle bums who go roaring through town a la Marlon Brando [in The Wild One]," wrote Dominis in his notes. "Rather they comprise doctors, lawyers, businessmen, mechanics, and others who enjoy the competition and the open country." Pictured: McQueen takes a lunch break during the race with Bud Ekins, his friend and stuntman for The Great Escape.
CREDIT: John Dominis/TIME & LIFE Pictures.
Paramount's New Heavyweight
McQueen works out at the gym at Paramount Pictures, for whom he was making the movie Love With the Proper Stranger, opposite Natalie Wood. Perhaps a signal of their confidence that he was the next big thing, Paramount's suits also gave McQueen the dressing room that had belonged to Gary Cooper.
CREDIT: John Dominis/TIME & LIFE Pictures.
The Outdoorsman
"He liked camping, he liked rugged things, he liked firing a gun," says Dominis, who captured this photo of McQueen during a trip the star took with his buddies in the Sierra Madre Mountains. He also very much liked his cigarettes: Like many Hollywood stars of the time, McQueen was an unapologetically heavy smoker, and did not break the habit until he became sick in the late '70s.
The actor was at a critical juncture in his career when these photos were taken. He'd just made his big-screen breakout as one of The Magnificent Seven. A couple months later he'd enter the Badass Hall of Fame with the release of The Great Escape.
CREDIT: John Dominis/TIME & LIFE Pictures.
More often than we might imagine, the actor or actress first envisioned in a role is not the one who winds up with it. This creates some interesting what-ifs when that role becomes iconic. When it appeared Marlon Brando would not play Terry Maloy in Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront, for instance, Kazan agreed to use Frank Sinatra, who had just won an Oscar for From Here to Eternity. Brando decided to take the part after all—and Sinatra never forgave Kazan for what he saw as a straight-up betrayal. Today, of course, it’s hard to imagine anybody but Brando in the role.
Steve McQueen passed or missed out on an unusually large number of iconic roles. Here are five that could have been his, but which, for one reason or another, he didn’t play in his relatively brief but storied career.
After appearing in one Frank Sinatra vehicle—John Sturges’s Never So Few, in which he replaced Sammy Davis, Jr. (Frank and Sammy had had a falling out)—McQueen was offered a role in Sinatra’s next vehicle, a “Rat Pack” picture about a gang of casino thieves. But Steve chose to bow out: Being one of the Rat Pack was not, he decided, what he wanted for his career. The role of Tony Bergdof went instead to Richard Conte.
McQueen was director Blake Edwards’s first choice to play Paul Varjak in the screen adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella. He wanted to do it, but CBS and the producers of his hit series Wanted: Dead or Alive would not allow him enough time off to make the movie. The part went instead to George Peppard, and made him a star.
McQueen was considered already part of the deal by Twentieth Century-Fox when they acquired William Goldman’s buddy-buddy script set in the Old West, which heavily romanticized the lives of the two folk heroes. However, McQueen insisted on first position (i.e., top billing), and Paul Newman would not acquiesce. After months of negotiations, McQueen walked out of a meeting set up to settle the impasse; his role went instead to then-unknown actor Robert Redford.
McQueen had a tiny role in Newman’s Somebody Up There Likes Me: He played a juvenile delinquent who appears in the first ten minutes of the film. He always felt competitive with Newman, and he vowed that one day he would receive billing over him. Years later, in 1975’s The Towering Inferno, the billing of the two stars was divided according to market, with each actor sharing the first position on a country-by-country basis. McQueen also insisted that he and Newman have the exact same number of words to say in the film, and that he get the movie’s last line. (He did.)
McQueen turned down this Don Siegel film because he felt it was too close to Peter Yates’s Bullitt, in which he had starred; he didn’t want to be typecast. The part went instead to Clint Eastwood. Without a doubt, there would not be a Dirty Harry—at least not in the form we know it—without Bullitt: Both are set in San Francisco and star soft-spoken tough guys who carry big guns and show no mercy to the bad guys.
Ditto, even more so: Bullitt practically invented the modern car-chase sequence that is at the heart of William Friedkin’s policier. This time, the role went to Gene Hackman, who won an Oscar for his performance as Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle.
Why did everyone in Hollywood want to cast Steve McQueen? Take a look at the photos LIFE shared with Slate in the slideshow above; they may give you some idea.
