Bill Ash escaping activities. He ended the war as a flight lieutenant. In August 2015, the BBC reported: "When Ash died aged 96 last year his obituaries noted that he was said to have been the model for Virgil Hilts, the lean, leather-jacketed airman played by Steve McQueen in the 1963 film "The Great Escape"". The character Hilts, nicknamed "The Cooler King" because of the time he spends in the prison camp's punishment block (which the prisoners call the "cooler") for his persistent escape attempts, steals a motorbike and tries to escape to Switzerland but is caught while using it to jump
Steve McQueen filmography in "Never So Few" (1959), his first of three films with John Sturges. In 1960, McQueen achieved stardom when he co-starred alongside Yul Brynner in Sturges' western, "The Magnificent Seven", which was based on Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film "Seven Samurai". After a series of unsuccessful films for the next two years, McQueen teamed up with Sturges again in the war drama "The Great Escape" (1963), where he played Virgil Hilts, a World War II prisoner of war who along with fellow Allied POWs makes an escape from a high security prisoner-of-war camp. It emerged as one of the highest-grossing films