Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [1]
Steve McQueen had it. His special, unique talent was his ability to balance his inner heat (his emotional rage, his distrust of older authority figures, and his defiance of them) and his cautious, careful, catlike wariness that so beautifully translated to the screen as the ultimate in cool. Although much of what he managed to accomplish in film was the result of his ability to trust his instincts, his emotional balancing act gained him the reputation as one of the best practitioners of the then in-vogue acting style of moody, brooding strength that was the by-product of the so-called Stanislavsky Method. He had studied the Method while a struggling actor in his early New York days, and it gave him a disciplined approach to acting. McQueen’s raw intensity—his talent—was always there; he was, in life, an emotional time bomb who ticked with metronomic precision—tick, the need to hold in all the rage; tock, the need to let it all out—on-screen or off. This was what gave his characters their power, and despite all the acting classes, keeping the beat was the only real method he ever used and the only one he ever needed.
In 1958, after struggling as a stage and live TV actor, McQueen hit it big in the filmed TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive, his gateway to Hollywood and the twenty-eight feature films he would make in his lifetime. His resume is admittedly brief, with barely enough credits to admit him into the pantheon. His output is not only qualitatively minimalist but quantitatively minimal when compared with the 217 one-hour episodes and more than seventy features made by his contemporary Clint Eastwood (who is still going strong). People tend to forget that Eastwood and McQueen were born the same year—1930—and that their TV and film careers began approximately the same time (Wanted: Dead or Alive in 1958, Eastwood’s Rawhide in 1959).
Interestingly, neither McQueen nor Eastwood ever appeared especially comfortable in cinematic scenarios of romance (although both were very much players in real life). Eastwood, with his poncho, cigarillo, and regal loneness, was able to externally fetishize his ability not just to exist but to thrive on-screen without women, while McQueen seemed too emotionally inhibited, his eyes too haunted, too downcast, to be a truly romantic leading man. Auteurist critic and historian Andrew Sarris pointed out after McQueen’s death that he was “that rarity of rarities, a Method Action Hero.”
The Method played a key difference between McQueen’s approach to acting and to his career and Eastwood’s (who is a purely instinctive actor). The Method did to McQueen what it did to a lot of aspiring actors in the mid-to-late 1950s: it held up Marlon Brando as an ultimately unattainable icon to try to emulate. It confused and intimidated novice actors such as McQueen, who didn’t fully understand the essence of the Method—that it was intended to personalize performances and liberate emotions within the context of a reality already existing in the actor. In McQueen it led to fake impressions rather than true expressions of pain and personalization, and all the posturing that went with that falsity. (To many of McQueen’s teachers, good imitation Brando was better than no Brando at all.) For the rest of his career, McQueen would be saddled with the burden of trying to prove he was an “actor.” It led to Method-gone-mad disasters such as An Enemy of the People (George Schaefer, 1978) and narcissistic Method-gone-motorized failures such as Lee H. Katzin’s Le Mans (1971), the latter a dispirited failure that left McQueen’s spirit broken and his life, career, and finances in shambles.
Eastwood, on the other hand, from the earliest days of his career, couldn’t have cared less about any method but the one that worked for him—looking good in front of a camera and trusting his director enough to know how to make him look good on-screen. His detached professionalism exemplified the angry