By nature or early upbringing McQueen was a hard ungenerous spirit a man who trusted no one and used anyone

By nature or early upbringing, McQueen was a hard, ungenerous spirit, a man who trusted no one and used anyone. A lot of male movie stars live on the aura of toughness while hardly being on nodding terms with it in real life. That might have continued had he not found a tank to drive and tinker with. He was now set up as a guy who liked chicks and engines, with a deep fear and loathing of women, and who preferred to hang out with the boys, drive motor bikes and fast cars and keep gangs of eager groupies on call. He was also a lout with a nasty temper, a needler, a mean spirit, as well as a charmer who could switch from forbidding frown to happy-go-lucky lopsided grin in a split second.It isn't a pretty story, but you feel its emotional authenticity. The mother then turned him over to Boys' Republic, a kind of remand home.With scant education, he went from there into the Merchant Marine, and then the Marines He was in the brig twice after going AWOL to pursue chicks.

Over the years, Steve saw his mother, but it's clear he blamed her far more than he did his father for being raised on a farm as a kind of orphan. He was tough and out of control, and by the time he went to Los Angeles in his early teens - trying to keep up with his mother - he was in gangs and a petty thief. McQueen was born in 1930 in a small town in Indiana, the child of a barnstorming flier who moved on a month or two after the birth, and never met his son again, and of a woman who left the boy to be looked after by older relatives in Slater, Missouri. He'd directed him in The Cincinnati Kid, so he knew how brutish and intractable he could be. But McQueen read the script and knew that's what he wanted to be. So many good movies begin with the star's fantasising energy.

He ignored jokes that he'd never worn a tie before on screen (not quite true) He tried on good clothes. He thought of what it meant to have money and power (he had those) and assurance (much more elusive). Then one day, as even Jewison had to admit, he had the walk, the look and the presence of Crown - of a trucker turned into a tycoon. Yet he had always been such a bad boy. Rather, we have the eyes now to see that he was better than we thought, so sure about film's divining of inner being or hope. Norman Jewison, who directed the original Thomas Crown Affair, was violently against McQueen in the title role.

No, if you were really hip to what happened with the original, you'd cast Sean Penn or Brad Pitt. Because - am I right, or am I right? - Thomas Crown was, is and ever will be Steve McQueen Dead nearly 19 years, McQueen is more than remembered. Because I don't think I'm the only one, more than 30 years later, who says that the whole point of being Thomas Crown was not that the actor looked and behaved like a prince. Better than anyone else, he has managed to say his name is James Bond without leaving us wistful for Sean Connery He's handsome, urbane, smart and vaguely classy Isn't that right for Crown? Well, yes, but no. There is a re-make of The Thomas Crown Affair about to open, and the people behind it are taking a hell of a chance.

In this updated version of the story about a man so rich he has grown bored with life, so he finds a hobby - robbing banks, Crown is played by Pierce Brosnan Now, I am not unimpressed with Mr Brosnan. `Joseph Beuys Drawings: The secret block': Royal Academy, W1 (0171 300 8000) to 16 September. What could be more benign than a watercolour sketch of a carnation plant, especially one that is meant to foster universal happiness? Why, then, do you hear the quiet thrum of Wagner in the background when you look at it, feel the distant shiver of megalomania?`': Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (0131 624 6200) to 12 September. Works like Dianthus (1945) - a watercolour sketch of a carnation plant - demonstrate an extraordinary graphic talent that must have taken some courage to set aside in favour of making felt suits and boxed fish.At the same time, Dianthus also represents the (literal) first flowering of Beuys's later obsession with Golden Bough-ish vegetal myths, primitive shamanism and the like. Curated, pre mortem, by the artist himself (the pictures were chosen by him in 1974 as a latter-day Codex Atlanticus), the exhibition shows, among other things, that Beuys could draw like an angel when he felt like it.