Steve McQueen, the enigmatic and intensely troubled King of Cool, was a Hollywood icon yet the ultimate, all-American loner, On screen he was the incomparable, laid-back action hero who jumped barbed wire fences on his motorbike, but at the height of his career, he chose to bewilder audiences by filming Ibsen's 'An Enemy Of the People'. Christopher Sandford's compulsive study of the ultimate rebel reveals how, long before his fifteenth birthday, McQueen knew what it was like to be dyslexic, deaf, illegitimate, backward, beaten, abused, deserted and raised Catholic in a Protestant heartland. Behind McQueen's screen persona lay a moody and sometimes violent husband, fond of casual sex and bare knuckle fighting, yet who was also a loyal friend and loving father. This book also reveals - for the first time - the bizarre cirumstances around the star's death. This is the definitive story of the complex, man behind the icon of cool. Softback. 497 pages. |