'Still living in Steve land'

It's more than 25 years since movie legend Steve McQueen died from cancer, aged 50, leaving his young ex-model widow Barbara, then 27, to pick up the pieces. Today, she lives in a little farmhouse in the wilds of Montana and has been married to Dave Brunsvold for more than 15 years, but there are memories of her late husband everywhere.

At the entrance to her driveway is a sign: 'If you go past this point you better have a damn good reason', a favourite saying of Steve's. She has a gun on top of her fridge and a shotgun under her bed to ward off unwelcome visitors.

The two rocking chairs she and Steve used to sit in at their home in Santa Paula, California, are on the porch of her current home; she has also kept the saddles and bridles from his riding days and antique toys and furniture he collected. ''I'm still living in Steve-land,'' she admits.

There's even a big picture of him in her bedroom.

''I look at it not as Steve, but as a really beautiful photograph. My husband looks at it as Steve. He'll say 'Take it down.' I say 'No, it's an excellent photograph'.''

Dave, she admits, has had to put up with a lot. Did he ever feel there were three people in the marriage? ''I don't know,'' she reflects. ''I give him credit for putting up with all this.''

Steve McQueen was the ultra-cool film star of the 1960s, rising from a troubled youth spent in reform schools to screen icon. He remained at the top of his tree for many years, with classic films including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair.

When he developed a persistent cough on what would be his last movie, The Hunter, Barbara made him go to the doctor, who referred him to hospital in Los Angeles where he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a type of cancer linked with asbestos. It may have come from his years of racing, as the fireproof cloth under the masks was made of asbestos. Steve was told he had three to six months to live, but doctors kept it from Barbara. Less than a year later he was dead.

''I wasn't fully informed at all. Doctors told him one thing and me another thing. I guess he loved me enough that he didn't want to hurt me. Afterwards I was so mad. If he knew it was that voracious a disease, he should have gone out and done something different - but that was his decision.''

Steve's last six months were spent in Juarez, Mexico, where he was getting alternative treatments. He died after surgery to remove several tumours in his neck and abdomen.

''I went to my house in Idaho with one of my cats and spent a couple of months lying on the floor crying. But he always told me to keep my chin up and be strong, so once I got over the initial shock I went skiing, rode horses and tried to do my normal stuff.'' But she still can't bring herself to watch his films.

Barbara was a top model when she first met Steve in her early 20s. He saw her in a Club Med advertisement and arranged a meeting, on the pretext that he wanted to audition her for a part as an Indian princess in his movie, Tom Horn. There was no such part.

Barbara had also got the wrong end of the stick about the meeting. ''I thought I was meeting Paul Newman, so I was really excited. Out walks this scraggy old guy.''

After her initial shock at his appearance - he had a beard and long hair - they got along famously. ''There was something there that just grabbed me. I just thought he was wonderful.

''He interviewed me and really put me to the test. He wanted to make sure I wasn't one of those girls who were after him because he was a movie star.''

The farmer's daughter from Oregon who liked the simple things in life - drinking beer, hanging out and taking a ride with Steve on one of his old motorbikes - was to be his soulmate for the last three-and-a-half years of his life.

Some ten months before his death, the couple married in January, 1980 - he was 49 and she was 26. Steve also became a born-again Christian, which brought him great inner peace, Barbara reflects.

In his earlier career he was notorious for scene-stealing and famously competitive, insisting he had the same amount of lines as Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno and that his part in The Great Escape be rewritten to make him the star. But by the time he met Barbara, she says he had mellowed and that she just knew the man, not the movie star. ''Had he not gotten ill, I know we'd have moved to a ranch, had lots of animals and had kids.''

More than 25 years later, Barbara remains childless. ''I always thought I could still have them when I was young enough and all of a sudden one day I was not young enough anymore.''

Barbara was Steve McQueen's third wife - he had previously been married to Neile Adams, with whom he had two children, Chad and Terry (who died in 1998 from a rare genetic disorder), and then to Ali MacGraw, his co-star in The Getaway.

Was he difficult to live with?

''I must have gotten him at a good time in his life. I'm not saying that he wasn't difficult, but I'm laidback and maybe that made him a little easier. He never laid a hand on me. Whenever we had a spat he'd bring me home a kitten. When he passed away I went back to Idaho with 13 cats. So I presume all the time together we only had 13 spats.''

While many of her Steve McQueen possessions have been auctioned off, Barbara still has hundreds of pictures of him that she took during their time together, when she was a budding photographer. Now, she has put many of these photographs into a book, Steve McQueen: The Last Mile, in which she also charts their life together. An accompanying exhibition takes place in London later this month.

She won't dwell on his agonising, drawn-out death in the book or in person.

''He should be remembered for his life, not his death. He was the most interesting man I ever knew, and my first love.''

* Steve McQueen: The Last Mile, by Barbara McQueen with Marshall Terrill, (Dalton Watson, £29).