Steve McQueen died 46 years ago this Saturday. His heart gave out on November 7, 1980, in a small clinic in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and the man born March 24, 1930, was only 50. He had known he was seriously ill for less than a year, and he spent much of that year chasing a cure his own doctors could not give him.
If you grew up with him, you may have met him first as bounty hunter Josh Randall on Wanted: Dead or Alive. Then came The Great Escape, the 1963 prison camp classic where Charles Bronson met the woman he would later marry, and five years later Bullitt sent his Mustang flying over the hills of San Francisco. Steve McQueen’s final days were quieter than any of those films. They also ended with something in his hands that few fans would have predicted.
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It began with a cough in 1978 that would not go away, and by 1979 he was struggling to breathe. In December 1979, doctors found pleural mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the lining of the lungs that is usually tied to asbestos. Medical historian Barron H. Lerner called it incurable in The New York Times, and History.com gives the same diagnosis and year.
McQueen had his own idea about where it came from. As a young Marine in the late 1940s, he was put to work stripping asbestos insulation from pipes aboard a troop ship. He came to believe that job was the most likely cause, as his widow Barbara has recalled in interviews and Australia’s Canberra Times recounted in 2021. He also wondered about movie sound stages and the fireproof suits he wore while racing cars, which History.com notes were later suspected too.
Radiation and chemotherapy did little, according to Lerner. When his doctors ran out of answers, McQueen went looking for someone who claimed to have one.
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That someone was William D. Kelley, a Texas orthodontist who said he had cured his own pancreatic cancer with a regimen of his own design. Texas had suspended his dental license in 1973 and the American Cancer Society had blacklisted him, according to Lerner. In July 1980 McQueen quietly traveled to Rosarito Beach to be treated under Kelley’s program.
The treatments sound hard to believe today. Lerner lists coffee enemas and injections of cells taken from sheep and cattle, along with laetrile made from apricot pits, and History.com describes the same enemas and apricot pit therapy. When the tabloids tracked him down that fall, McQueen confirmed he was being treated in Mexico. Cancer organizations warned that his reported recovery was a hoax.
His final film, The Hunter, opened that August with McQueen playing real-life bounty hunter Ralph “Papa” Thorson. It was the same trade that had made him a TV star two decades earlier. By October he was back in California and getting worse, with tumors growing in his abdomen. American doctors warned that his heart could not survive an operation, but he decided to have one anyway. First, he asked to see one particular visitor.
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McQueen’s faith did not arrive at the end. Columnist Liz Smith reported in June 1979 that he had become a born-again Christian, about six months before his diagnosis, according to Fox News. Billy Graham later wrote that McQueen accepted Christ weeks before he even knew he was ill, after long talks with Sammy Mason, the pilot who taught him to fly a vintage biplane.
In early November 1980, Graham visited him at his ranch near Santa Paula, according to both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and The Christian Post. When the two men got ready to pray, McQueen could not find his own Bible. “Billy Graham instinctively gave him his Bible,” biographer Marshall Terrill told Fox News. “It became Steve’s prized possession.”
As Graham left, McQueen called out, “I’ll see you in heaven!” according to accounts in Showbiz Cheat Sheet and Movieguide. Graham described the visit in his foreword to a 1983 memoir by McQueen’s ranch manager, Grady Ragsdale. “I had planned to minister to Steve,” he wrote, “but as it turned out, he ministered to me.” Days later McQueen crossed into Mexico carrying Graham’s Bible.
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He checked into a Juárez clinic under the name Samuel Sheppard, a detail reported by the El Paso Times and recorded by later biographers. On November 6, surgeons removed tumors from his abdomen and neck, an operation his American doctors had warned his heart might not survive.
McQueen came through the operation, but his heart failed early the next morning, about 12 hours later. Barbara, his wife of ten months, had made the trip to Juárez with him. By a coincidence Graham’s admirers still point to, November 7 was Billy Graham’s 62nd birthday.
Terrill and pastor Greg Laurie later pieced together that final morning for a book on McQueen’s faith. In their account, as reported by The Christian Post, his son Chad came to the room around 6 a.m. and found his father with Graham’s Bible clutched in his hands. “He was holding onto that Bible and I think he probably was praying,” Laurie said. Chad spent his life racing cars in his father’s honor until his own death in September 2024 at 63.
Inside that Bible, Graham had written a dedication dated just four days earlier. “To my friend Steve McQueen,” it read. “May God bless you and keep you always. Billy Graham. Philippians 1:6, Nov. 3, 1980.” The verse he chose promises that the One who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.
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