How meeting Billy Graham changed Steve McQueen’s life
Actor Steve McQueen, who personified cool during his nearly two decades as a Hollywood superstar, retreated from the glamour and excesses of the movie scene late in his short life and embraced Christianity.
When he died at age 50, McQueen was clutching a Bible — one given to him by Billy Graham. The Charlotte-born evangelist had handed it to the actor, then gravely ill with cancer, during a private meeting Nov. 3, 1980 — just four days before McQueen died after surgery in Mexico.
Nearly 37 years later, the story of Steve McQueen’s faith journey is finally about to be told on the big screen — the medium that made him internationally famous as the action hero in hits such as “Bullitt” and “The Great Escape.”
And though Billy Graham, now 98 and living in his mountaintop Montreal home, doesn’t speak or appear in person in “Steve McQueen: American Icon,” the preacher and his Bible play a major role in its final minutes.
Much of the drama in the new faith-based documentary feature film comes late: Viewers are told that McQueen took along the Graham Bible — with a prayerful note from the evangelist on an inside page — when he travelled to Juarez, Mexico, for the operation to remove a tumour.
The actor died of a heart attack shortly afterward, on Nov. 7, 1980. And when Grady Ragsdale, the manager of McQueen’s ranch in California, went to retrieve the body, he pulled the sheet back and found that McQueen had died clutching the Bible to his chest.
Greg Laurie, a lifelong McQueen fan and the pastor of one of America’s biggest megachurches, Harvest Christian Fellowship in Southern California, puts it this way in the film: “He was holding on to the Bible of Billy Graham as he entered eternity.”
In an 1980 interview with the Asheville Citizen not long after McQueen’s death, Graham called his meeting with the actor “one of the most heartwarming stories of my ministry. I think it illustrates how lonely most well-known people are, how guarded they must live and how they really are searching for something. Steve McQueen found what he was searching for.”
The film — “Steve McQueen: American Icon” — also features interviews with actor Mel Gibson, other actors who worked with McQueen, a renowned stuntman, pilots who taught McQueen how to fly, his pastor, his biographer and the last of his three wives, model Barbara Minty McQueen.
Steve McQueen became a movie star in the 1960s, establishing his image as the King of Cool in the roles of the motorcycle-riding POW in “The Great Escape” and the Ford Mustang-driving police detective in “Bullitt.” But toward the end of his life, McQueen disconnected from Hollywood.