Steve McQueen - Personal Life

Personal Life

McQueen was married three times and had two children. On November 2, 1956, he married actress Neile Adams, by whom he had a daughter, Terry Leslie (June 5, 1959 - March 19, 1998), and a son, Chad (born December 28, 1960). McQueen and Adams divorced in 1972. McQueen then married his The Getaway co-star Ali MacGraw on August 31, 1973, but this marriage too ended in divorce in 1978. MacGraw suffered a miscarriage during their marriage. On January 16, 1980, less than a year before his death, McQueen married model Barbara Minty. One of McQueen's four grandchildren is actor Steven R. McQueen.

In the early 1970s, while separated from Adams and prior to meeting MacGraw, McQueen had a lengthy relationship with model-actress Barbara Leigh, his co-star in Junior Bonner. Leigh became pregnant during the relationship and had an abortion. Biographer Marc Eliot wrote that McQueen had an affair with his Bullitt co-star Jacqueline Bisset, although Bisset has not confirmed this. Actress-model Lauren Hutton has claimed that she and McQueen had an affair in the early 1960s.

McQueen had a daily two-hour exercise regimen, involving weightlifting and at one point running five miles, seven days a week. McQueen also learned the martial art Tang Soo Do from ninth degree black belt Pat E. Johnson.

However, he was also known for his prolific drug use (William Claxton claimed he smoked marijuana almost every day; others said he used a tremendous amount of cocaine in the early 1970s). In addition, like many actors of his era, he was a heavy cigarette smoker. He sometimes drank to excess, and was arrested for driving while intoxicated in Anchorage, Alaska in 1972.

After Charles Manson incited the murder of five people, including McQueen's friends Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, at Tate's home on August 9, 1969, it was reported that McQueen was another potential target of the killers. According to his first wife, McQueen then began carrying a handgun at all times in public, including at Sebring's funeral. In fact, two months after the murders, police found a hit list with McQueen's name on it, a result of McQueen's company having rejected a Manson screenplay. In 2011 it was revealed that Sebring had invited McQueen to the party at Tate's house on the night of the murders. According to McQueen, he had invited a girlfriend to come with him, she instead suggested an intimate night at home which saved his life.

McQueen had an unusual reputation for demanding free items in bulk from studios when agreeing to do a film, such as electric razors, jeans and several other products. It was later found out that McQueen requested these things because he was donating them to the Boy's Republic reformatory school for displaced youth, where he had spent time during his teen years. McQueen made occasional visits to the school to spend time with the students, often to play pool and to speak with them about his experiences.

After discovering a mutual interest in racing, McQueen and his Great Escape co-star James Garner became good friends. Garner lived directly down the hill from McQueen and, as McQueen recalled, "I could see that Jim was very neat around his place. Flowers trimmed, no papers in the yard ... grass always cut. So, just to piss him off, I'd start lobbing empty beer cans down the hill into his driveway. He'd have his drive all spic 'n' span when he left the house, then get home to find all these empty cans. Took him a long time to figure out it was me".

Barbara Minty McQueen in her book, Steve McQueen: The Last Mile, writes of McQueen becoming an Evangelical Christian toward the end of his life. This was due in part to the influences of his flying instructor, Sammy Mason, and his son Pete, and Barbara. McQueen attended his local church, Ventura Missionary Church, and was visited by evangelist Billy Graham shortly before his death.