Escape Artists

On this day in 1944, 76 Allied prisoners of the Stalag Luft III escaped through the tunnels they had surreptitiously built over the course of the preceding year.  On that same day, a young man named Steve McQueen celebrated his 14th birthday on his grandparents' Missouri farm, though by most accounts celebration may have been too happy a word.

Reportedly, he ran off to join the circus later that year.  McQueen bounced back and forth between his grandparents' farm and the home of his mother, who was unhappily married several times; eventually he ended up in a juvenile facility.  He joined the Marines in 1947 and in the early fifties with money from the GI Bill, he studied acting with Sandford Meisner.  He became a big star with the 1960 Magnificent Seven, and in 1963 director John Sturgis gave him the lead in The Great Escape, a "loosely-inspired" (as the saying goes) recreation of the Stalag Luft escape.

The real Stalag escape did not end happily--73 of the 76 escapees were caught; 50 were executed.  Seventeen years after his starring turn, McQueen could not effect his own great escape from cancer.  Though he fled to Mexico to try experimental treatment, he died in 1980 at the age of 50.