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Sat 8 November 2025 15:15, UK
Even 45 years after his death on November 7th, 1980, Steve McQueen is still remembered as Hollywood’s ‘King of Cool’. However, there was another actor he believed deserved to be called the industry’s reigning monarch, which is high praise coming from someone who didn’t always get along with his co-stars.
The star’s boundless charisma and magnetic screen presence made him one of the biggest names of his era, not to mention one of Tinseltown’s highest-paid figures, which helped compensate for the difficult reputation that frequently made McQueen a thorn in the side of his collaborators.
He had a long-running feud with Paul Newman, who was once mistaken for his nemesis by an autograph hunter and signed it, ‘Fuck you, Steve McQueen’, and things reached a head when the two A-listers became embroiled in the pettiest dick-measuring contest in cinema history while making The Towering Inferno.
James Garner was his friend, and even he admitted that his pal’s ego often made him a nightmare on set, while Yul Brynner was regularly exposed to McQueen’s petulant side when they were shooting The Magnificent Seven. Still, because audiences adored him so much, the one-time Academy Award nominee didn’t find himself ostracised for causing so much trouble behind the scenes.
A recurring theme in McQueen’s career was that he’d be at his most prickly when paired with a star of a similar calibre, with self-preservation usually at the forefront of his thinking. One of his earliest films saw him share the screen with one of the most iconic of their, or any other, era, but since he was still a relative newcomer, he wouldn’t dare try and one-up Frank Sinatra on 1959’s Never So Few. Onscreen, at least.
It was only his fourth credited role in a feature, and his last before The Magnificent Seven catapulted him into the spotlight, and he wasn’t daunted by the prospect of sparring with ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’, another actor who wasn’t always the easiest person to work with. If anything, that’s what made them get along so famously, with McQueen explaining that he liked the way Sinatra didn’t take any shit.
“Not many people impress me, but he did, because I knew he was like the ‘King of Hollywood,’” he said. “And he’d have your head cut off if he wanted. Or your knees broken. So when we started on the picture, I had trouble figuring out how I should be towards him. I guess, at first, I was like, ‘Yeah, well, OK, so you’re Frank Sinatra’, like I didn’t care.”
They instantly got along, even if their first exchanges could have easily turned their relationship into animosity. McQueen recalled that Sinatra “broke the ice” by putting firecrackers in his gun belt when he was reading his script, causing him to jump “three feet in the air.” In response, he picked up a prop machine gun and fired it at the crooner, “and those bullets hit the dirt all around his feet.”
“Everybody stood in silence,” he remembered. “We looked like we were in some kind of showdown. No one knew what he’d do, and I didn’t have a clue.” Fortunately, Sinatra thought it was hilarious, and they became “like two big kids who didn’t grow up” for the rest of filming, showing that even Steve McQueen found would bend the knee to ruling the ‘King of Hollywood’.
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