Steve McQueen's Final Months: The Cancer, the Mexican Clinic and the Death of the King of Cool

Jul 14

9 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Steve McQueen in a cap beside a child near a Pepsi mural in Mexico in 1980, with the headline Steve McQueen's Final Months

Steve McQueen spent most of his career being the coolest man on any screen. He did his own driving in Bullitt, got the credit for the fence jump in The Great Escape and turned up to a three-week LIFE magazine shoot looking like he'd been born in sunglasses.

Seventeen years after that shoot, he was lying in a one-storey brick clinic in Ciudad Juárez under a dead man's name, his body riddled with tumours, after months of coffee enemas and apricot-pit injections from a former orthodontist who'd told the world he was cured. Within hours of the surgery he'd gambled everything on, he was gone. This is how the King of Cool's last year actually played out.

Quick Answers

How did Steve McQueen die? His heart gave out in the early hours of 7 November 1980, about 12 hours after surgery to remove tumours from his neck and abdomen.
What did he have? Pleural mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the lung lining that's almost always caused by asbestos.
Where did he die? The Clínica de Santa Rosa, a small private clinic in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just over the border from El Paso.
How old was he? He was 50.

The Cough on the Chicago Set

The cough started in 1978. McQueen gave up cigarettes, a habit he'd had for decades, and went through rounds of antibiotics, but nothing touched it.

By the autumn of 1979 he was in Chicago making The Hunter, playing the real-life bounty hunter Ralph "Papa" Thorson. It turned out to be his final film, not his second-to-last as it's sometimes described. That was Tom Horn. The Hunter shoot included a chase across the top of a moving "L" train, and McQueen still wanted to do as much of the physical work as he could. Roger Ebert's obituary later noted that this was the shoot where McQueen first began to suspect something was seriously wrong. The breathlessness was getting worse and it was getting harder to hide on set.

A bearded Steve McQueen with his wife Barbara Minty in Mexico in 1980 — Steve and Barbara McQueen in Mexico in 1980, the year they married and the year he died.

On 22 December 1979, the month after filming wrapped, a biopsy gave him the answer: pleural mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer of the membrane that lines the lungs. There was no cure then and there still isn't.

Where the Asbestos Came From

McQueen tried to work out where his exposure had come from, and the honest answer is that there were plenty of candidates. He'd raced cars and motorbikes for years in fireproof suits and helmets lined with asbestos. Film soundstages of the era were routinely insulated with the stuff.

McQueen himself pointed further back. As a young Marine he was given a punishment detail stripping asbestos lagging from the pipes of a troop ship, and he later said the air down there had been thick with dust. War History Online makes the case that his service was the most likely source, and the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization has told his story in much the same way.

It's a grim twist for a man whose whole image was built on chasing danger he could see coming. Racing was the risk he went looking for, much like Ayrton Senna, whose final day behind the wheel is its own story. The asbestos was the one nobody had warned him about.

Keeping It Secret, and Failing

By February 1980, scans showed the cancer had already spread through his chest. McQueen wanted it kept private, but the National Enquirer ran the story on 11 March 1980, reporting that his cancer was terminal. From then on his illness was public property, chased by tabloids and wire services for the rest of the year.

Steve McQueen, thin and bearded in a cap, leaning on a post beside a child outside a shop with a Pepsi sign in Mexico in 1980 — One of the last photos taken of McQueen, in Mexico in 1980.

His last public appearance is usually dated to 28 March 1980, in Oxnard, California. The trim action star of a decade earlier turned up heavy and bearded, looking nothing like the man on the posters.

A New Wife and a New Faith

His private life was changing fast too. On 16 January 1980, less than a month after the diagnosis, he married model Barbara Minty, his third wife. The pair honeymooned in Mexico, and she stayed with him to the end.

In her book Steve McQueen: The Last Mile, Minty wrote that he became an evangelical Christian in that final year, nudged along by his flying instructor Sammy Mason, Mason's son Pete and Minty herself. McQueen had taken up flying vintage planes from the airfield at Santa Paula near his ranch and started going to Ventura Missionary Church.

Shortly before he died, evangelist Billy Graham flew out to see him. Museum of the Bible tells how Graham handed over his own Bible when McQueen realised he hadn't brought one. Pastor Greg Laurie later said McQueen was found holding that Bible when he died.

It wasn't a tidy love story, though. Pat Johnson, the martial arts instructor who became McQueen's closest friend in this period, later said that Ali MacGraw, his second wife, remained the love of his life despite their 1978 divorce. MacGraw did go to see him while he was being treated in Mexico, which Roger Ebert's 1980 obituary mentions almost in passing.

The Orthodontist on the Baja Coast

With American doctors telling him there was nothing more they could do, McQueen headed south in the summer of 1980 to be treated by William Donald Kelley. Kelley wasn't a cancer specialist. He wasn't a medical doctor at all. He was a former Texas orthodontist whose licence had been revoked in 1976, and he'd built a following around his own theory that cancer was a problem of pancreatic enzymes.

The hospital bed at the Clínica de Santa Rosa in Juárez where Steve McQueen died in 1980 — The bed at the Juárez clinic where McQueen died on 7 November 1980, hours after surgery to remove his tumours.

The treatment was run from Plaza Santa Maria, a clinic on the coast road south of Rosarito Beach. The building later became the Plaza del Mar hotel, which locals still know as the Pyramid, and Baja Bound notes that it served as a laetrile clinic for years. McQueen had raced the Baja 1000 across the same peninsula in his prime. Now he was there for a very different reason.

What he got was a version of the Gerson therapy: coffee enemas, frequent shampoos, daily injections of fluid made from live cattle and sheep cells, pancreatic enzymes, dozens of vitamin pills a day, massages, prayer, psychotherapy and laetrile, a compound made from apricot pits. Laetrile had already been tested and found useless against cancer, and it can cause cyanide poisoning. Medical historian Barron Lerner has written about how McQueen's very public use of it gave the drug a second life it never deserved.

None of it was cheap. McQueen reportedly paid upwards of $40,000 a month over about three months, which is well over $150,000 a month in today's money. It's the oldest con in medicine, and it goes back at least as far as Dr Serge Voronoff, who made a fortune in the 1920s stitching monkey testicle tissue into wealthy men.

"Keep Your Fingers Crossed"

For months the treatment was kept under wraps. When McQueen finally confirmed where he was, in October 1980, he dictated a public statement. He took a swipe at the tabloids, said he wanted to be left alone to get on with the treatment and asked fans to "keep your fingers crossed". UPI reported the animal-cell injections, and the clinic insisted his cancer was retreating.

Kelley went further. When McQueen returned to the US in early October, Kelley announced that his patient would make a full recovery and get back to normal life. McQueen went home to his ranch in Santa Paula for what was described as a rest. Within weeks, huge new tumours had appeared in his abdomen. One on his liver was reported to weigh around five pounds.

Samuel Sheppard Checks In

American surgeons wouldn't touch him. The tumours were too widespread and they doubted his heart would survive the operation. McQueen wanted them out anyway, and he found someone willing in Ciudad Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso.

The Clínica de Santa Rosa was a one-storey brick building with 20 beds, run by surgeon Dr César Santos Vargas and his wife Rosa María, who handled the administration. Santos Vargas was a kidney specialist, better known locally for patching up injured bullfighters than for treating Hollywood stars. McQueen checked in under the name Samuel Sheppard.

If the alias was a joke, it was a dark one. The real Sam Sheppard was an Ohio doctor convicted of murdering his wife in 1954, then acquitted at a retrial, in a case widely seen as the inspiration for The Fugitive. Either way it worked. The staff had no idea who their patient was, and Santos Vargas later told the El Paso Times he'd simply liked the man, describing him as sure of himself and very sincere.

The Last Night in Juárez

The operation went ahead on 6 November 1980 and lasted about three hours. Santos Vargas told UPI that he'd warned McQueen against it, and that once he opened him up he found a huge malignant tumour in the right lung that had already spread to the left lung, the neck and down into the intestines. He removed what he could from the neck and abdomen.

McQueen came through it. Rosa María told reporters afterwards that he'd been improving and was even talking. A story that's been repeated ever since has him giving a thumbs-up and saying "lo hice" ("I did it") in Spanish. It's a great line, but it doesn't match what the surgeon told the El Paso Times at the time, which was that McQueen died in his sleep without saying anything at all.

His heart gave out at around 3:45am on Friday 7 November 1980, roughly 12 hours after the operation, with Minty and family close by. He was 50.

A Cheap Casket and a Rattling Old Ford

What happened next was strangely unglamorous for the biggest film star in the world. By midday McQueen's body was at the Prado funeral home in Juárez, where Santos Vargas carried out an autopsy that took about half an hour. Word got round the local press and reporters and TV crews piled outside.

El Paso Times photographer Carlos Rosales ended up riding in the funeral home's station wagon, which the paper described as a rattling old Ford, as it carried McQueen across the border in an inexpensive casket. The El Paso Times's own retelling of that day says his friends were waiting at El Paso International Airport with a chartered Lear jet to fly him home to California.

What Came After

McQueen was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the Pacific. His memorial service was led by Leonard DeWitt of Ventura Missionary Church, the congregation he'd only recently joined.

Barbara Minty, who later wrote Steve McQueen: The Last Mile, went on to work with the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization and testified before Congress in support of banning asbestos imports into the US. In 2012 the same group honoured McQueen posthumously with its Warren Zevon Tribute Award, named after the singer who also died of mesothelioma.

Kelley carried on promoting his enzyme theory for years. As for the McQueen family, his daughter Terry died in 1998 and his son Chad, who followed him into both acting and racing, died in September 2024.

More than four decades on, McQueen's image still sells everything from sunglasses to sports cars. It's the same image that the Baja clinic and the Juárez operating table couldn't save: the fastest, coolest man in the room, gone at 50 after chasing a cure that was never going to work.