Steve McQueen Bio-Pic On the Way

Wednesday

14Jan2009

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 4:20AM

Bio-pics are tricky business, particularly when they're about movie stars and especially when the family is involved in the project. So while I would initially be concerned about a film biography of Steve McQueen, the source material makes me feel a little better about it.

Two producers, Michael Cerenzie and Christine Peters, have picked up the rights to the biography, Steve McQeueen: Portrait of an American Rebel, according to Variety. This is not some Steve McQueen & Me book that his widow wrote, although Barbara Minty has given her blessing to the project. Instead, this is a fairly frank and in-depth look at McQueen's life by Marshall Terrill.

We'll see most of McQueen's Hollywood career, which spanned about 25 years, all told, but he crammed about 40 years of hard living into them, with multiple dalliances and marriages with beautiful women, a well-known jones for speed racing (which actually pre-dates the acting), as well as a drug problem and the unlikely and untimely death at the age of 50 following surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his stomach.

What we probably won't see is a sugarcoated McQueen, because who in their right mind wants that? And that's kind of an important step since, with his widow, McQueen became an evangelical Christian in the years before his death.

If you're young, just know that Steve McQueen is still cooler than you'll ever be, and he's been dead for 29 years. It was The Great Escape that cemented his star power, and he went on to make Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Towering Inferno, Papillion, and The Getaway. He earned an Oscar nomination for his work in The Sand Pebbles. At one point in the 1970s, McQueen was the world's highest-paid actor, and he was so in demand throughout his career that he reportedly turned down lead roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Apocalypse Now, First Blood, Ocean's 11, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Dirty Harry, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

As for casting the bio-pic, I don't know why anyone would look any further than Daniel Craig. And that's about all I have to say about that.

Colin Boyd |

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