Terence Steven McQueen was born on March 24, 1930, at St. Francis Hospital in Beech Grove, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis. His father, William Terence McQueen, was a stunt pilot for a barnstorming flying circus who left McQueen's mother, Julia Ann (a.k.a. Julian; nee Crawford), six months after meeting her. Several biographers have stated that Julia Ann was an alcoholic.

In 1952, with financial assistance provided by the G.I. Bill, McQueen began studying acting in New York at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. Reportedly, he delivered his first dialogue on a theatre stage in a 1952 play produced by Yiddish theatre star Molly Picon. McQueen's character spoke one brief line: "Alts iz farloyrn." ("All is lost."). During this time, he also studied acting with Stella Adler in whose class he met Gia Scala.  McQueen began to earn money by competing in weekend motorcycle races at Long Island City Raceway and purchased the first of many motorcycles, a Harley-Davidson and Triumph. He soon became an excellent racer, and went home each weekend with about $100 in winnings (equivalent to $900 in 2017). He appeared as a musical judge in an episode of ABC's Jukebox Jury, that aired in the 1953-1954 season.  McQueen had minor roles in productions including Peg o' My Heart, The Member of the Wedding, and Two Fingers of Pride. He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in the play A Hatful of Rain, starring Ben Gazzara.  In late 1955, at the age of 25, McQueen left New York and headed for California, where he moved into a house on Vestal Avenue in the Echo Park area, seeking acting jobs in Hollywood. When McQueen appeared in a two-part television Westinghouse Studio One presentation entitled The Defenders, Hollywood manager Hilly Elkins (who managed McQueen's first wife, Neile) took note of him and decided that B-movies would be a good place for the young actor to make his mark. He landed his first film role in a bit part in Somebody Up There Likes Me, directed by Robert Wise and starring Paul Newman. McQueen was subsequently hired for the films Never Love a Stranger, The Blob (his first leading role) which depicts a flesh eating amoeba-like space creature, and The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery.  McQueen's first breakout role came on television. He appeared on Dale Robertson's NBC western series, Tales of Wells Fargo. Elkins, then McQueen's manager, successfully lobbied Vincent M. Fennelly, producer of the western series Trackdown, to have McQueen read for the part of bounty hunter Josh Randall in a Trackdown episode. McQueen appeared as Randall in the episode, cast opposite series lead and old New York motorcycle racing buddy Robert Culp. McQueen then filmed the pilot episode, which became the series titled Wanted: Dead or Alive, which aired on CBS in September 1958.  In 1971 McQueen starred in the poorly received auto-racing drama Le Mans. Then came Junior Bonner in 1972, a story of an aging rodeo rider. He worked for director Sam Peckinpah again with the leading role in The Getaway, where he met future wife Ali MacGraw. He followed this with a physically demanding role as a Devil's Island prisoner in 1973's Papillon, featuring Dustin Hoffman as his character's tragic sidekick.  In 1973 The Rolling Stones referred to McQueen in the song "Star Star" from the album Goats Head Soup for which an amused McQueen reportedly gave personal permission. The lines were "Star ######, star ######, star ######, star ###### star/ Yes you are, yes you are, yes you are/Yeah, Ali MacGraw got mad with you/For givin' head to Steve McQueen".  By the time of The Getaway, McQueen was the world's highest-paid actor, but after 1974's The Towering Inferno, co-starring with his long-time professional rival Paul Newman and reuniting him with Dunaway, became a tremendous box-office success, McQueen all but disappeared from the public eye, to focus on motorcycle racing and traveling around the country in a motor home and on his vintage Indian motorcycles. He did not return to acting until 1978 with An Enemy of the People, playing against type as a bearded, bespectacled 19th-century doctor in this adaptation of a Henrik Ibsen play. The film was never properly released theatrically.  His last two films were loosely based on true stories: Tom Horn, a Western adventure about a former Army scout-turned professional gunman who worked for the big cattle ranchers hunting down rustlers, and later hanged for murder in the shooting death of a sheepherder, and The Hunter, an urban action movie about a modern-day bounty hunter, both released in 1980.  In 1998 director Paul Street created a commercial for the Ford Puma. Footage was shot in modern-day San Francisco, set to the theme music from Bullitt. Archive footage of McQueen was used to digitally superimpose him driving and exiting the car in settings reminiscent of the film. The Puma shares the same number plate of the classic fastback Mustang used in Bullitt, and as he parks in the garage (next to the Mustang), he pauses and looks meaningfully at a motorcycle tucked in the corner, similar to that used in The Great Escape.  In 2005, Ford used his likeness again, in a commercial for the 2005 Mustang. In the commercial, a farmer builds a winding racetrack, which he circles in the 2005 Mustang. Out of the cornfield comes Steve McQueen. The farmer tosses his keys to McQueen, who drives off in the new Mustang. McQueen's likeness was created using a body double (Dan Holsten) and digital editing. Ford secured the rights to McQueen's likeness from the actor's estate licensing agent, GreenLight, for an undisclosed sum.  At the Detroit Auto Show in January 2018, Ford unveiled the new 2019 Mustang Bullitt. The company called on McQueen's granddaughter, actress Molly McQueen, to make the announcement. After a brief rundown of the tribute car's particulars, a short film was shown in which Molly was introduced to the actual Bullitt Mustang, a 1968 Mustang Fastback with a 390 cubic-inch engine and a four-speed manual gearbox. That car has been in possession of the same family since 1974 and hidden away from the public until now, when it was driven out from under the press stand and up the center aisle of Ford's booth to much fanfare.

What for?
a commercial for the 2005 Mustang.