Steve McQueen had a passion for cars, bikes and speed. Aside from his most iconic vehicle, the Highland Green Mustang GT from Bullitt, McQueen’s vehicle of choice was his 1957 Jaguar D-type XK-SS.

He first saw the car on a Studio lot off Sunset Blvd., in 1958. He was instantly smitten and paid the owner $5,0000 for it. His love of cars and bikes carried on throughout his life (hence Le Mans), though surprisingly he only carried out a tenth of the driving seen in the famous car chase in Bullitt.

After his success with The Towering Inferno in 1974, McQueen took time out to travel around the country in a motorhome, riding motorcycles across different parts of the country.

McQueen had been the ideal casting for John Frankenheimer’s classic film Grand Prix, until he clashed with Frankenheimer’s business partner, and the role went to James Garner.

In fact there were a lot of roles McQueen knocked back during his career,  including Dirty Harry, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (lawyers and agents couldn’t agreeing on who got top billing, McQueen or Newman), The Driver (another obvious choice); The French Connection, and even Close Encounters of the Third Kind (he told Spielberg he couldn’t cry on cue). Sadly, one of his best performances in the adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People (1978), was barely released and has languished ever since. Producers hated the way McQueen looked in the title role - he was bearded and overweight. Tragically McQueen died too soon in 1980 - he was just fifty - and in 1984, his beloved XK-SS was sold at auction for a reported for $148,000.
 
Via Retronaut
 

 
Peter Yates has died. Along with his many accomplishments as a film maker, Yates will be fondly remembered among action fanatics for his groundbreaking direction of one of the baddest badass car chases in the history of cinema. Watch the clip from Bullit below and be amazed.

Yates directed two of my alltime favorite films: Breaking Away and The Friends Of Eddie Coyle. When he was on his game, he was among the best.

4-time Oscar nominee Peter Yates—who helmed such celebrated and dissimilar films as Bullitt, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, Breaking Away, Suspect, and The Dresser—has passed away in London after a long illness. He was 82. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he was a stage actor before working as an assistant director for Tony Richardson. Yates’ feature directorial debut was the early 1960s low-budget Summer Holiday (1963) with Cliff Richard And The Shadows. He soon graduated to the 1967 crime thriller Robbery, a fictionalized version of Britain’s The Great Train Robbery. It was a short jump to his first American film, Bullitt (1968), starring Steve McQueen in one of the definitive cop movies of all time thanks to that car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Other films he directed included John and Mary (1969), Murphy’s War (1971), The Hot Rock (1972), For Pete’s Sake (1974), The Deep (1977), Eyewitness (1981), The Dresser (1983), Krull (1983), Eleni (1985), Suspect (1987), The House on Carroll Street (1988), An Innocent Man (1989), Year of the Comet (1992), Roommates (1995), and Curtain Call (1999). He earned two Oscar nominations (director and producer) for Breaking Away, and another two (director and producer) for The Dresser.

For a fascinating inside look on how the car chase in Bullitt was created click here.
 
Bullitt starring Steve McQueen. No CGI, just great cinematography, editing and stunt driving.