Steve McQueen hated Paul Newman during the making of ‘The Towering Inferno’
Few names are etched more vividly into the stone of Hollywood history than Steve McQueen, the American film star nicknamed ‘The King of Cool’, who appeared in some of the most celebrated commercial hits of the 20th century. A lover of cars, bikes and motorsports, the actor is perhaps best known for his on-screen high-octane hijinks, speeding away from the POW camp in 1963’s Great Escape or screeching through the streets of Chicago in 1968’s Bullitt.
McQueen wasn’t the only one who loved a bit of petrol-fuelled excitement either, with his fellow Hollywood peer Paul Newman having a successful career as a car racer from the early 1970s up until his death in 2008. As natural-born petrolheads, the pair were also pretty competitive, so when the duo starred together in John Guillermin’s 1974 action movie The Towering Inferno, chaos ensued.
Adapted from two novels, Stirling Silliphant’s The Tower and Richard Martin Stern’s The Glass Inferno, Guillermin’s movie tells the story of the opening party of a massive office building which tragically catches fire and threatens the lives of everyone within. Nominated for ‘Best Picture’ in 1975, the celebrated film took home awards for ‘Best Cinematography’, ‘Best Film Editing’ and ‘Best Original Song’ for ‘We May Never Love Like This Again’.
Battling for screen time, however, Newman and McQueen locked horns on the set of the movie, with their egos clashing in an all-star Hollywood bout. Stories of this rivalry include sneaky tactics from both of them, with McQueen even asking screenwriter Stirling Silliphant to add 12 lines of dialogue for his character, just so that he would have the exact same as Newman’s co-protagonist.
This feud steadily intensified on set, with Newman being deeply unhappy with the Bullitt star for counting his lines and demanding an equal share of screentime. In the book Paul and Me, penned by A.E. Hotchner, the writer claimed that when he visited Newman on the set of the movie, he was infuriated with McQueen, even calling him “chicken shit” for his behaviour.
McQueen’s feud with Newman wasn’t the only one to hang over the actor during his career either, with the iconic star also failing to see eye-to-eye with Yul Brynner on the set of 1960’s The Magnificent Seven. Though the film co-starred a number of Hollywood icons, including Charles Bronson, Eli Wallach, and James Coburn, McQueen couldn’t help but try and claim as much of the limelight as possible.
Annoyed that his character only had seven lines of dialogue in the original script, McQueen pressured the director to give him some control behind the camera instead, which the actor used to his full advantage. Using his position operating the view of the audience, McQueen upstaged Brynner by drawing more attention to himself during some of Brynner’s biggest moments, flipping a coin or rattling shotgun shells.
Clearly something of a boisterous Hollywood ego, McQueen undoubtedly remains an icon of the era. Take a look at him and Newman in the trailer for The Towering Inferno below.
