Hard to believe that there are two Steve McQueen's in the film industry. But it got me thinking about this one...
A few years ago I viewed the original version of “The Thomas Crown Affair” with Steve McQueen. I immediately followed this with Pierce Brosnan’s remake of the same film. This was a great exercise for me because what became clear to me was that Steve McQueen had that thing referred to in Hollywood as “it.” He had the “it factor.” I hadn’t really thought about it before (or since) but it was very apparent to me at the time and made me think about some of the other McQueen films that I’d seen and enjoyed over the years (The Great Escape, Papillon, Bullitt, The Cincinnati Kid…) and I realized how much I’d underestimated him as an actor with true screen presence.
Steve McQueen was cool. Plain and simple. He was just being himself onscreen. You can’t teach that to young actors if they don’t have it already. Even though he trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio in the 1950’s, he was very aware of his own limitations as an actor, and admitted that he only took on roles where he could basically play a variation of himself.
