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 are on the porch. 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 says.

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. I give him credit for putting up with all this."

McQueen was the ultra-cool film star of the 1960s. 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. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer linked with asbestos inhalation.

It may have come from his years of racing, as the fireproof cloth that went 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.

"After he died 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."

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.

"There was something there that just grabbed me. I just thought he was wonderful."

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.

The couple married in January, 1980. 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.

Barbara was Steve's third wife - he'd previously been married to Neile Adams, with whom he had two children, Chad and Terry, and then to actress Ali MacGraw.

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 or screamed at me. We never got into heavy fights. 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."

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 large coffee table book in which she also charts their life together.

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."