Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [36]
For Brynner, the film marked the last of his “big” movies, which had begun with his Oscar-winning appearance in Walter Lang’s 1956 screen version of The King and I, in which Brynner reprised the role he had originated on Broadway, and for which he won a Best Actor Oscar. A string of big successes followed, including Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments and Anatole Litvak’s Anastasia, also released in 1956, but despite appearing in another thirty movies after The Magnificent Seven, Brynner was never again able to duplicate his earlier successes.
Eli Wallach would remain a stage actor with occasional forays into film, until his appearance as the Ugly in Leone’s 1966 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly established him as a major movie star. Brad Dexter’s acting career continued to decline, and he eventually became a successful film producer. Charles Bronson appeared in big action films and became a box-office sensation in the 1970s playing a murderous vigilante in the cultural touchstone urban-nightmare Death Wish films. James Coburn went on to appear in more than seventy movies and won a Best Supporting Oscar for his role in Paul Schrader’s 1997 Affliction. Robert Vaughn appeared in several more movies but made his name as the star of the popular 1960s TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Horst Buchholz returned to Europe, where his film career thrived.
And Steve McQueen was able to use The Magnificent Seven to put himself on the road to superstardom, going “from name to face to star,” as Andrew Sarris put it. His visual charm was underscored by his lean, muscular frame, his beautiful blue eyes and moppy blond hair, and his fluid way of moving. In the climactic shootout, he turns, twists, dives, shoots, and rolls with such balletic grace and precision it often brought cheers from the audience.
AFTER THE film’s release, thirty-year-old Steve went on a spending spree, purchasing a $300,000 Japanese-Danish–style house on Solar Drive in Nichols Canyon, once owned by Howard Hughes’s paramour Terry Moore, with floor-to-ceiling windows offering a panoramic view; a ranch house in Palm Springs with a fifty-five-by-thirty-five-foot swimming pool; and fifty acres of open land near Carmel, California.
Returning for a third season of Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve had both his manager, Hilly Elkins, and his agent, Stan Kamen of the William Morris Agency, continue to aggressively search for another big-screen role for him, but not in another ensemble cast. And no more Yul Brynners. He wanted the audience’s focus only on him.
At the same time, just before the start of production on The Magnificent Seven, Neile had been slated to test for the role of Anita in Robert Wise’s upcoming film version of West Side Story, which she hoped would serve as something of a comeback for her. That plan was short-circuited when she learned she was pregnant again. The part went instead to Rita Moreno, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for it.
Also in 1960, Steve was named Rookie of the Year by the American Sports Car Association for his participation in several races, something that brought him a sense of relief from all the pressures of his acting career. According to Steve Ferry, a friend of Steve’s at the time, “He races to get the garbage out of his system.”
BACK IN production on Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve began to complain again, this time to the show’s new producer, Ed Adamson, a Four Star employee, that the new scripts didn’t make sense and weren’t being shot correctly. He was also angered by what he considered the show’s continual rotation of directors not always familiar with either its premise or, more important, the idiosyncratic nature of the Josh Randall character.
Things came to a head when Adamson hired TV director Richard Donner,