Steve McQueen's Final Months: The Cancer, the Mexican Clinic and the Death of the King of Cool
- Jul 14
- 7 min read
Steve McQueen spent most of his career being the coolest man on any screen. He was the guy doing his own stunts in Bullitt, jumping the fence in The Great Escape (or at least getting the credit for it), and turning up to a three-week LIFE magazine shoot looking like he'd been born in sunglasses. Less than two decades after that shoot, he was checking into a small Mexican hospital under a fake name, weighing a fraction of his usual weight, and hoping a dentist with a revoked license could do what American oncologists said was impossible. This is what happened in the eleven months between his diagnosis and his death: who treated him, who stood by him, and how the King of Cool actually died.
The Cough He Couldn't Shake
It started in 1978 with a persistent cough. McQueen gave up cigarettes, a habit he'd had for decades, and went through rounds of antibiotics, but nothing cleared it up. His breathing kept getting worse over the following year, and by the time he wrapped filming on what would be his second-to-last film, The Hunter, in late 1979, something was clearly seriously wrong.
On December 22, 1979, a biopsy gave him the answer. McQueen had pleural mesothelioma, a rare and aggressive cancer that attacks the lining of the lungs and is almost always caused by asbestos exposure. There was, and still is, no cure for it.
A Lifetime of Exposure Catching Up With Him
McQueen gave a medical interview a few months after his diagnosis in which he tried to work out exactly where the exposure had come from, and the honest answer is that there were several candidates. He'd worn asbestos-lined racing suits and helmets during his years of competitive motorcycle and car racing. Movie soundstages of the era were routinely insulated with the stuff. But McQueen himself thought the real damage was done decades earlier, during his time in the Marine Corps, when he was assigned to strip asbestos lagging from pipes aboard a troop ship. He later said the dust in the air had been so thick he could barely breathe.
It's a grim footnote to a life built partly around danger he could see coming. Racing was the risk McQueen actively chased, in the same spirit as drivers like Ayrton Senna, whose own final day behind the wheel is its own story. The asbestos that likely killed McQueen, by contrast, was a risk nobody had warned him about at all.
Going Public, Then Trying to Go Quiet Again
By February 1980, scans showed the cancer had already spread widely through his body. McQueen tried to keep the diagnosis private, but the National Enquirer broke the story on March 11, 1980, reporting that he had terminal cancer. From that point on, his illness was public property, tracked by tabloids and wire services for the rest of the year.
The toll it was taking showed. McQueen made what turned out to be his last public appearance on March 28, 1980, at an event in Oxnard, California, and the man who turned up bore little resemblance to the trim action star of a decade earlier. Witnesses described him as paunchy and bearded, a world away from the guy who used to do his own motorcycle jumps.
A New Wife, and a New Faith
Amid all of this, McQueen's personal life was changing too. On January 16, 1980, less than a month after his diagnosis, he married fashion model Barbara Minty, his third wife. She stayed by his side for the rest of his life, and the two even honeymooned in Mexico that year even as his health was failing.
According to Minty's own account, published years later in her book Steve McQueen: The Last Mile, McQueen became an evangelical Christian in his final year, a shift she credited partly to his flying instructor Sammy Mason, Mason's son Pete, and to her own influence. McQueen started attending Ventura Missionary Church, and evangelist Billy Graham visited him personally shortly before his death, reportedly gifting McQueen his own Bible after McQueen realised he hadn't brought one to a prayer session. That Bible stayed close to him for the rest of his life. When he died, he was said to be holding it.
It's worth noting that McQueen's final years weren't a simple, tidy love story with Minty either. Pat Johnson, the martial arts instructor who became McQueen's closest friend and training partner in this period, later said plainly that his second wife, actress Ali MacGraw, remained the one true love of McQueen's life right up to the end, despite their divorce in 1978. Minty was the one who married him, nursed him and stayed at his bedside, but by his own friend's account, McQueen's heart never fully left MacGraw.
Rosarito Beach and the Orthodontist Who Promised a Cure
With American doctors telling him there was nothing more conventional medicine could do, McQueen travelled to Rosarito Beach, Mexico, in July 1980, to be treated by William Donald Kelley. Kelley is worth pausing on, because he wasn't a cancer specialist by any stretch. His only medical licence, in orthodontics, a branch of dentistry, had been revoked back in 1976. What he offered instead was a variation of the Gerson therapy, built around coffee enemas, frequent shampoo washes, daily injections of fluid made from live cattle and sheep cells, pancreatic enzyme supplements, around 50 vitamins and minerals a day, massages, prayer sessions, psychotherapy, and laetrile, a compound derived from apricot pits that had already been shown to be both toxic and useless against cancer.
None of it was cheap. McQueen reportedly paid Kelley in cash, upwards of $40,000 a month, more than $150,000 in today's money, across a three-month stay. It's the same basic pattern that's shown up around confident men selling unproven cures for as long as there's been money to be made from desperate patients, going all the way back to characters like Dr. Serge Voronoff, who made a fortune in the 1920s convincing wealthy men that monkey testicle tissue would rejuvenate them. When McQueen returned to the United States in early October 1980, Kelley publicly declared he'd made a full recovery and would be back to normal life. Within weeks, huge new tumours had developed in his abdomen.
One Last Surgery in Juárez
By late October, McQueen was in serious pain and had a tumour on his liver weighing around five pounds. American doctors warned that operating was too dangerous, both because the tumour itself was inoperable by conventional standards and because they doubted his heart could survive the procedure. McQueen and Minty pushed ahead anyway.
He flew to Ciudad Juárez and checked into a small local clinic under the name Samuel Sheppard, an alias that carries its own dark irony. The real Sam Sheppard was an Ohio doctor convicted, then acquitted on retrial, of murdering his wife in the 1950s, a case so notorious it became the direct inspiration for The Fugitive. Whether McQueen picked the name deliberately or not, the staff treating him in Juárez had no idea they were operating on one of the most famous men in the world.
The surgeon was Dr. Cesar Santos Vargas, a kidney specialist better known locally for putting badly injured bullfighters back together. He later told the press he'd warned McQueen against the operation, and that once he opened him up, he found the cancer had spread far beyond what anyone expected, a huge malignant tumour in the right lung that had already reached the left lung, his neck, and down into his intestines. Vargas also said McQueen showed an immense will to live in the short time he knew him, managing to walk and chew on ice chips in the hours after surgery.
The surgery went ahead on November 6, 1980, beginning around 8 a.m. and lasting roughly three hours, removing or reducing the tumours in his neck and abdomen. McQueen survived the operation itself. Hours later, in the small hours of November 7, 1980, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 50 years old. By most accounts he died in his sleep, with Minty and his family at his bedside.
What Came After
McQueen was cremated, and his ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean. His memorial service was led by Leonard DeWitt of Ventura Missionary Church, the congregation McQueen had only recently joined. Barbara Minty went on to write about their brief marriage and his final months in Steve McQueen: The Last Mile, and later worked with the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, eventually testifying before Congress in support of a ban on asbestos imports into the United States.
In 2012, more than three decades after his death, the same organisation posthumously honoured McQueen with its Warren Zevon Tribute Award, named for another public figure who died of an asbestos-linked cancer.
McQueen's son Chad, who followed his father into both acting and racing, died in September 2024. His daughter Terry died in 1998. Decades on, McQueen's estate remains one of the most valuable of any dead celebrity, still trading on the exact image the Rosarito clinic and the Juárez operating table couldn't save: the fastest, coolest man in the room, gone at 50 chasing a cure that was never going to work.
Sources
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2. War History Online — Steve McQueen's USMC Service Likely Contributed to His Cancer Diagnosis — https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/steve-mcqueen-cancer.html
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5. Dr. Barron Lerner — McQueen's Legacy of Laetrile — https://drbarronlerner.com/mcqueens-legacy-of-laetrile/
6. UPI Archives — Mexican Doctor Says He Warned McQueen Against Surgery — https://www.upi.com/Archives/1980/11/09/Mexican-doctor-says-he-warned-McQueen-against-surgery/8758342594000/
7. El Paso Times (Tales from the Morgue) — 1980: Steve McQueen Dies in Juárez — https://elpasotimes.typepad.com/morgue/2013/11/steve-mcqueen-dies-in-juarez.html
8. Fox News — Steve McQueen Became a Born-Again Christian, Found Comfort in Billy Graham Before Succumbing to Cancer — https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/steve-mcqueen-born-again-christian-billy-graham-cancer-book
9. Christian Post — Actor Steve McQueen Was Found Clutching Billy Graham's Bible When He Died — https://www.christianpost.com/news/actor-steve-mcqueen-was-found-clutching-billy-grahams-bible-when-he-died-greg-laurie-says-184078/
10. Museum of the Bible — Steve McQueen and Billy Graham's Bible — https://www.museumofthebible.org/book-minute/steve-mcqueen-and-billy-grahams-bible
11. Simmons Hanly Conroy — Steve McQueen & Mesothelioma: How Did He Get Mesothelioma? — https://www.simmonsfirm.com/blog/famous-mesothelioma-deaths-steve-mcqueen/
12. UPI Archives — Steve McQueen Being Treated With Experimental Animal Tissue — https://www.upi.com/Archives/1980/10/23/Steve-McQueen-being-treated-with-experimental-animal-tissue/6228341121600/
13. The List — Celebrities Who Tragically Died From Undergoing Surgery — https://www.thelist.com/2071878/celebrities-died-undergoing-surgery/
