On 3rd January 1956, one of the least star-like of modern stars came into this world, in the small town of Peekskill in upper New York state. Mel Columbcille Gerard Gibson was the sixth of ten children born to Hutton and Anne Gibson. As might be guessed from the number of siblings, Mel Gibson's parents were devout Catholics, of solid Irish stock.

Mel’s father had an extremely strong influence on how the family was brought up. His father had been very religious and had passed this on to Hutton. When a young man, Hutton decided to enter the priesthood and attended a seminary, the Society of the Divine Word, in Chicago. However, he disliked the attempts of the Roman Catholic Church to make its liturgy more modern and quit. He replaced the Church with the army another all—male organization and served in the Pacific in World War II. His experiences there, both of the Godlessness of his fellow troops and the sights of war, made him determined that no children of his should ever serve in the military. He also visited Australia, his mother’s native country, as it was a staging post for American GIs.

After leaving the army, Hutton took a job with the New York Central Railroad to provide the means for a family that was expanding rapidly. New York City seemed an unsuitable place to bring a family up so the Gibsons moved upstate, first to Crotonon-Hudson, and then to a slightly larger home at Verplanck Point, also on the Hudson. This was to be Mel’s first home.

Life in the Gibson household was run on severely moral grounds. Hutton’s view of the world seems to have been quite fixed, and he saw everything in black and white terms. Furthermore, there was little money to go round because of Hutton’s job, and the family was left to entertain itself using its own resources, though the children found plenty to amuse them in the countryside. From an early age, Mel was an entertainer, using charm and humor to bend the rules.

In 1961, the family moved to a farmhouse in Mount Vision. It was Hutton’s dream to be able to bring his family up in an idyllic environment and originally he had hoped to be able to farm as well as hold down his railway job. The problem was that Mount Vision is 200 miles north of New York, and this meant that while he was away all week the family was totally isolated, as Anne Gibson could not drive. The children went to a non-denominational school, as Hutton was unable to find a suitably reactionary Catholic one. Life was hard for the Gibsons, and made significantly worse in 1964 when Hutton had a serious accident in the rail yard, and lost his job. The family had to move to cheaper rented accommodation, and Mel’s elder siblings, who were now young adults, took jobs to help out. Three years of fighting the railroad to gain compensation now began.

Hutton became increasingly despairing of life in the USA. The sixties were, in his eyes, a period of rapid moral decline — free love, psychedelic drugs, rock music — and at the other extreme, escalation of the war in Vietnam. He was also increasingly aware that the northeastern United States still clung to their Puritan roots and were actually hostile to Catholicism (many settlers had gone to America to avoid Catholicism in the first place). In February 1968 he won his case against the railroad and received $145,000 in compensation — a great deal of money nearly 30 years ago. This helped Hutton to decide: he would take his family to the other side of the world — Australia — a country where he hoped that stricter moral values still pertained.

Hutton Gibson decided that the journey to Australia should be an educative, leisurely tour, rather than a direct flight. And so the family visited Ireland and Scotland, to show the children where the family originated from, England and Rome. In Rome the family spent much time at the Vatican, the center of their faith. Mel also nearly got lost at Leonardo da Vinci airport, which could have led to a very different career!

The family arrived in Melbourne in November 1968 and moved almost immediately to a suburb to the north of Sydney. Mel was sent to St Leo’s College, a traditionalist Catholic school then run by the Christian Brothers. This was something of an ordeal for him as he was mercilessly teased for his American accent and the Brothers were renowned for running a strict regime. In response Mel became something of a rebel, taking up smoking and drinking and engaging in pranks designed to irritate his teachers. 

Eventually, though, he was rescued by his father from the school, because Hutton did not feel the religious teaching was adequate, and sent to Asquith High, a state school. Here Mel was much happier and became effectively ‘Australianized’. He continued to be regarded as something of an entertainer but did not shine in any other way at school. Meanwhile, his father was becoming increasingly isolated from the Catholic Church, whose continual modernizing he abhorred, until he eventually broke off completely from the official Church. At home he inculcated his children with a highly conservative, rigid religion, including extremist ideas of Jewish anti-Catholic conspiracies.

At school, Mel continued to indulge in typical youthful behavior, drinking beer, smoking and starting to date girls. In the latter respect, contrary to the reputation he was later to develop as a heart-throb, he was apparently shy and gawky, certainly when on a one-to-one basis, and he came to prefer mixing his dates with his mates, in authentic Australian macho style. Eventually school came to an end and Mel had to think of a career. During his early teens, due to his father’s influence, he had considered entering the priesthood; by the time he left school he no longer felt this calling. Journalism was thought of and rejected aptly in view of Mel’s later dislike of journalists. But fate took a hand: his sister Sheila, who thought his skill at pranks and pratfalls demonstrated thespian talent, filled out an application form, and sent it with five Australian dollars and a photo, to the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
 

THE ROAD TO FAME
Mel’s approach to his new trade was fairly nonchalant. First of all, he hadn’t known that he had applied to drama school and second, he wasn’t desperate to be an actor. But at the time of his application to NIDA, he was working in an orange juice bottling plant, and an acting course must have seemed rather more stimulating. Mel, somewhat to his own surprise, was accepted for NIDA, in the face of competition from many who were desperate to become actors. He attributed his success to the fact that he had been forced to resort to subterfuge so often at school, that this made him a natural. He had also shown himself a good mimic at school, with a keen ear for accents after all, he had had to adopt an Australian accent to survive.

NIDA was a rather basic establishment at the time Mel attended, consisting of leaky prefab huts at the University of New South Wales. Staff and students at NIDA found his attitude to the course less committed than theirs; Mel continued to engage in practical jokes and found it hard to take some of the exercises seriously. Many of the exercises were difficult to perform, such as playing out a part and turning on apparently strong emotions under the critical eyes of fellow students and teachers. It has to be said in Mel’s defense that the early seventies was an era when it was important to be laid-back, and even if one was industrious as a student, it was important not to admit it. Long hair and beards, marijuana and stronger substances were in, and conformity to unconventionality the norm. Mel was no exception, sporting a beard and flowing locks. Mel also found it difficult at the school because he did not have the same conviction, as the other students that acting was the only thing he wanted to do it certainly hadn’t been his original wish. At the same time he was keenly aware that some of the other ‘committed’ students looked down on him for not having the same outward dedication. Mel moved out of the family home after a year at NIDA to live with three of his friends. Life hotted up, and the four young men threw wild parties, annoyed the neighbors and chased girls. Despite this he began to shine at NIDA; not only was he cast as Romeo in the school’s production of Romeo and Juliet, he also became known as a scene-stealer. Whatever the importance of his role, he came to dominate productions with his charismatic presence. His attitude to an acting career was changing and he was beginning to enjoy the work and throw himself into it. When his hair and beard were cut for a forties production, Mel’s good looks were at last truly revealed.

In November 1976, it seemed that fame was beckoning, if in a small way. The producer Phil Avalon contacted Mel and his fellow student Steve Bisley and offered them both roles in a low-budget ‘surfing’ film, Summer City, set in the sixties. Summer City had hints of The Wild One, Easy Rider and American Graffiti in that the plot involved a group of youths arriving in a poky little town where they seduce one or more of the local girls, and end up facing the guns of the local populace/law enforcers. Fun ends in tragedy, and with it comes the recognition that freedom has its limits. The total budget was around A$100,000 and the actors’ fee was A$400, the union minimum. It was the sort of operation where everybody had to muck in and was a real introduction to the basics of filmmaking for Mel. He also had a fling with the leading lady, Deborah Foreman, which, when it was over, led to her making a suicide attempt at a drunken, drug-ridden party. After the film, Mel returned to NIDA to finish his course. In later years, he has looked back on his time at NIDA with affection, despite the early difficulties, and after the release of Hamlet, he sponsored a scholarship there.

The main benefit of the film, so far as Mel was concerned, was that his participation attracted the attention of Bill Shannahan, one of Australia’s most prestigious agents. Shannahan got Mel work on an Australian soap (The Sullivans) for two weeks. This brief exposure to television put Mel off the medium almost permanently — only once more was he to work in television. Soaps operate with a minimum amount of rehearsal, both for actors and for scriptwriters; for the serious actor they can be profoundly dissatisfying, as the emphasis is on getting the series out, not on the quality of acting.

Luckily, Mel’s next work was with the South Australian Theatre Company, a touring company, for whom he performed in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The part was physically exhausting and Mel had quite serious breathing problems due to his heavy smoking. The critics were not aware of this, however, and it received excellent reviews. It was on this tour, in Adelaide, that Mel met Robyn Moore, his future wife, a dental assistant who rented a room in the same house. Mel got to know her over a fairly long period she already had a boyfriend and Mel had to wait. She is described as being a fairly quiet person but for Mel she was to become a pillar of support in later years. In the meantime, Shannahan was spreading the word about Mel and a new offer came through in September 1977 from Dr George Miller, a producer—director. Mel couldn’t start immediately as he had to finish his course and graduate, which he did in October. George Miller held up work on the film until Mel could begin. The movie? Mad Max.

MAD MAX AND BEYOND
Mel’s breakthrough came almost as soon as he had left college. Although nobody expected it, this movie was to gain worldwide fame, with a poor showing only in the US. Mel’s fee was A$10,000, which was a serious sum of money for a recently graduated actor. Like Summer City, making the movie was very much a group activity. Actors helped shift equipment and there was no hierarchy, unlike in Hollywood. The crew and the cast shared a large house in Melbourne, and among their number were sonic real Hell’s Angels, who played the ‘Toe Cutters’. The budget for the film, which was to include a great deal of hair-raising action, was only A$250,000 a minuscule amount by Hollywood standards. Mad Max is set in the near future, in a city in a post—apocalyptic world, where there are villains and heroes, and hardly anybody else. Max is not exactly verbose and the similarities of his character to that of a taciturn Clint Eastwood in the Dollars series are obvious. Miller wanted to create a new sort of Western, with the forces of good and evil immediately identifiable. Its reputation for fairly mindless violence packed the cinemas, and the Australian Film Institute gave it no less than six awards, including best actor for Mel. An important part of its success was that it drew young men in droves to the cinemas generally they are hard to attract because of its high— adrenalin automotive action.

The success of Mad Max brought in multiple offers of work and Hollywood agent Ed Limato sought to put Mel on his books. It was at the start of a frenetic period of activity for Mel, the first of three films in a year. After Mad Max, there was more stage acting in Oedipus Rex and Henry IV in Adelaide, and another movie project, Tim, which was as about as far removed as it could have been from his previous role. Mel played a mentally retarded gardener who develops a relationship with a handsome woman in her mid-forties. She helps to educate him and in so doing revives her own positive attitude towards life. Tim helped hone Mel’s acting skills: in Mad Max he had not been stretched by the dialogue or by the demands of playing a particularly multi—faceted character. As a perfectionist Mel always wanted to spend more time on each scene of Tim, but because he was so quick to pick up director Michael Pate’s ideas, much of the film was shot in one take. It was filmed near Sydney and Robyn followed Mel up there, which indicates how the relationship was developing. While not a great international success, Tim did earn Mel an Australian Film Institute best actor award in 1979. He was seen as having sensitively developed the role, conveying the innocence of Tim’s character rather than his backwardness. It also showed the range of which he is capable to a wider film audience.

After, filming was complete, Mel was expected to take part in publicity for the film, and here his reputation for being uncooperative with the press began. Mel’s attitude to his work is that it is a job, and while he is entirely capable of commenting on any aspect of that job, such as his role, he does not feel it necessarily qualifies him to give his opinion on broader issues like the direction of the film industry or whatever, and where he does not feel qualified to comment, he does not. If a question isn’t relevant he won’t answer it. There is an absurd notion prevalent that because stars are so much in the public eye, they are therefore qualified to talk about any issue. Mel does not subscribe to this.

During the period that the film was released, Mel had several stage roles: in Romeo and Juliet, No Names, No Pack Drill (a play set in World War II Australia) and Waiting for Godot. The reviews, especially for the latter, were very enthusiastic.

Mel’s next film was Attack Force Z, a World War II yarn set in the Pacific. Things did not go well. The director initially chosen, Philip Noyce (who later directed Patriot Games and Dead Calm, among others), rowed with the producer over the budget and had to be replaced by Tim Burstall. Most of the cast, apart from the American John Philip Law, were unhappy with the change. Apparently Mel and the other Australian actors told Burstall that they simply did not want to do the film with him. Law was the star of the film, and his fee was $50,000 as opposed to the $1,000 a week that Mel and New Zealander Sam Neill received. He also stayed in a decent hotel while their accommodation was fairly shabby. This discrepancy rankled. Law was also six foot five, which meant that he had to adopt some ridiculous poses to make him and Mel appear to be of similar height. (Mel’s height seems to have varied slightly over the years, depending on who you believe, but the general consensus is that he is five eight or nine.) The film was shot in Taiwan as it was cheap to produce there, with plenty of Chinese extras to play Japanese soldiers. When completed the film received good reviews, but was not released in America. Mel had been unhappy with the whole project, drowning his sorrows in copious amounts of Taiwanese beer during the shoot, and was scathing of the movie itself thereafter. Also, according to one source, Mel visited a brothel there. In fact, the occasion was innocent. The Taiwanese ‘fixer’ for the film, Mr. Koo, invited several of the leading actors, including Philip Law and Mel, to what he thought was a Japanese restaurant. To the guests’ surprise the staff turned out to be young, female and naked! They later ascribed this to Mr. Koo’s idea of full Oriental hospitality. After the film, Mel ‘rested’ (the classic actors’ euphemism) determined not to act in any more low budget movies.

Roughly six months after the end of shooting, Mel married Robyn Moore in Forestville, New South Wales on 7 June 1980. The couple honeymooned north of Sydney at a friend’s house. The need for money began to press on Mel, as Attack Force Z had made him only 86,000, and Mel accepted a part in a TV series Punishment, one of several Australian prison dramas. As with The Sullivans, he disliked the process of TV production, where tight schedules and arduous hours allowed no time to develop a character. This came to an end, though, when Peter Weir, the director of Picnic at Hanging Rock a film that had done much to alert the world to the renaissance in Australian movie-making approached Bill Shannahan to see if Mel could act in his forthcoming film Gallipoli. This was the first involvement of media magnate Rupert Murdoch in backing a film, though later he acquired Twentieth Century Fox.

The Gallipoli campaign, a military disaster, had burnt itself into the Australian consciousness, because such a large part of the forces involved were Australians and New Zealanders. It was similar in its impact to the Western’ Front for the British and French. Essentially, it was a rite of passage, both for the innocent young men involved most of whom had never been abroad, let alone to Turkey, let alone introduced to the honors of modern warfare and for the nation. The sacrifice made Australia feel that it was on a level with the mother country, no longer a colony. In the film the story is portrayed through the eyes of Frank and Archie, two country boys who think they are off to save the world. Their experiences soon disillusion them, though the grim reality of their situation is partly compensated by the comradeship that develops between them.

The film was shot in difficult conditions in the outback at Beltana where the action begins and the camel—racing takes place, it was blisteringly hot and dusty; at Lake Torrens, bitterly cold. The filming then moved, though, into the congenial town of Port Lincoln, where a reconstruction of Anzac Cove had been built on the coast. The final part of shooting took place in Egypt, as Cairo had been the way station for ANZACs destined for Gallipoli. While Mel was there his first child, Hannah, was born.

Reviews of the film were excellent. Some of the British papers did not like some of the anti—British sentiments expressed in the film, the difference being that in World War I, the Australians tended to question what they regarded as ridiculous orders, whereas the British did not. The film was received rapturously in Australia and garnered nine awards from the Australian Film Institute, including another best actor for Mel. It also did well in the UK.

Gallipoli was followed up in 1981 by Mad Max II The Road Warrior. This had a classic Western plot, where a roving law— enforcer comes to the rescue of a civilized settlement under attack from savages, in this case not Red Indians or bandits, but Hell’s Angel variants distinguished by their ruthless brutality and their eccentric machinery.

Mad Max has returned in a somewhat damaged state with his leg in a brace, and had been reduced to eating dog food. The picture is solid action, with no mercy for the squeamish, and full of spectacular stunts. The final scenes, in which Mel draws off the assailants, while the townsfolk head off in another direction, are particularly gripping. Usually children and animals are regarded as the kiss of death by adult actors, as they distract audiences, but Mel did not find this a problem and developed a good relationship with Emil Minty, who played a feral child. The Road Warrior eventually grossed more than Mad Max, making over $100 million and did respectably in the USA, where it earned $24 million. It also marked Mel’s attractiveness to the fairer sex, as it was noted that women were as enthusiastic as men to see the film, unlike Mad Max which had been mainly popular with young men.

Mel often expressed his wish to get away from being typecast as a policeman (Mad Max, though it’s sometimes hard to believe, was a policeman) or as a soldier. His next project was to satisfy this wish.

After the success of Gallipoli, Peter Weir took on Mel for another project, The Year of Living Dangerously, in which Mel starred as an Australian journalist who has an affair with a British diplomat, played by Sigourney Weaver. Because Sigourney Weaver is so tall, Mel had to have his shoes built up to match her height. The story was set in 1 965 in Indonesia in a period of great political turmoil. This was Mel’s first encounter with different American schools of acting, a process he found educative, though he has never become a Method actor (where actors try and become the character they are playing, by behaving like that character all the time). Mel has always said he plays a part from outside. The film was difficult to shoot. Most of the location work was done in the Philippines, and the cast was subject to death threats from local Muslim fanatics, who thought the movie would be disrespectful to Allah. Because of this, towards the end of the shoot some scenes were shot in Australia, which suited Mel as his wife gave birth to twins on 2 June 1982 and he was able to be present this time. Though well crafted, the film did not seem to catch the imagination of audiences and was not the success it might have been. However, it did take Mel to Cannes for a showing at the annual film festival in May 1983, where he was compared to ‘other male hero characters John Wayne from the old generation, and Harrison Ford and Tom Selleck from the new.

After Living Dangerously, Mel turned down several lucrative film roles arranged for him by Ed Limato in Hollywood. Mel has declared that stage acting is preferable as a means of honing one’s acting skills to film work, and proceeded to take the part of Biff in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which played in Sydney for two months in the autumn of 1982. Mel has asserted that with stage acting you get a real response, unlike films where the only real audience, in terms of response to one’s performance, is the director. But Hollywood still beckoned, despite Mel’s preference for Australia, and Ed Limato got Mel a role in The Running Man, but he withdrew before production to take the role of Mr. Christian in The Bounty.

The Bounty was shot on Moorea, an island off Tahiti. While it might be many people’s idea of the perfect holiday destination —palm trees and white beaches — to stay and work on such a place for four months is pretty claustrophobic, with little in the way of entertainment apart from the bars. In a historical irony, the behavior of the original Bounty crew when it arrived in Tahiti in the 1780s was repeated by the film crew. Some took up with local women and there were brawls with the locals, as there had been in the l960s’ version. When away from Robyn, Mel indulged in marathon drinking sessions, one of which ended up in a minor fracas. While this might have endeared him to the Tahitiarians, the black eyes and bruises that resulted meant rescheduling of the scene-shooting order. All in all, the shooting of the film was not a particularly good period for Mel, and harsh words were said about his behavior. Later, when the film was released, the reviews were equally critical. Remakes of classics are highly risky: not only are they criticized in their own right, but also by comparison, and The Mutiny on the Bounty has received several film treatments including the classic 1962 Trevor Howard/Marlon Brando version.  

AMERICAN DEBUT
After The Bounty, Mel went on to play his first screen role as an American, and an American with a Tennessee accent at that. Mark Rydell, the director, had serious doubts about casting Mel in the part of a redneck farmer in The River, because he assumed Mel would have an Australian accent. But Mel’s ability to mimic convinced him and Mel got the lead role, playing opposite Sissy Spacek. The film was shot in eastern Tennessee and Robyn and the family came to stay nearby. It received moderate acclaim, most of it for Sissy Spacek who received an Oscar nomination. Mel’s next role was in a film called Mrs. Soffel, where he played opposite Diane Keaton; he was a prisoner, and she the warder’s wife who falls in love with him. The shooting conditions, in Canada and Pittsburgh, were miserable, as much of the time was spent hanging round in the freezing cold. Mel’s drink problem also received prominence on 25 April 1984 he was picked up for drunk driving, for which he received a three-month ban and a $300 fine. The reaction to the film itself was pretty mixed; Diane Keaton and Woody Allen is one thing, but Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson did not have the same chemistry.

Meanwhile, the ghost of Mad Max had reappeared. Hollywood was now interested, given the success of his previous two incarnations, and Warner Brothers were prepared to make a big-budget sequel. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was shot right in the middle of Australia, at Coober Pedy, 500 miles northwest of Adelaide, where the temperatures were so high that several members of the crew were struck down with heat exhaustion. Mel was tired from the films he had recently completed, only having taken a three-month break, and apparently took to the bottle in a big way. Reputedly, he was knocking back five bottles of beer before starting work, and drinking more through all the rest periods. He missed his family, his previous three films had made no real impact, and consequently he faced the end of any future he might have in Hollywood. He needn’t have worried. Beyond Thunderdome was a great success, making $40 million in the US alone.

Afterwards Mel decided to make a proper break and bought a farm in northern Victoria, which he began to work. He wanted to re—establish his links with his family as he was spending too much time away from them. He formed a production company Lovell Gibson with Pat Lovell, an Australian producer, the idea being to develop film projects in Australia. Unfortunately it did not quite work out like that, as a Hollywood producer, Jerry Weintraub suggested a link-up that would give him first refusal on any projects Lovell Gibson came up with. There was also one condition: Mel would have to star.

Soon after the, company’s foundation, Mel headed off to Hollywood to make Lethal Weapon, taking his family with him. Lethal Weapon was in the genre at which Mel excelled. It used the formula of two men Marty Riggs and Roger Murtaugh (played by Danny Glover) one active and aggressive, one older and wiser, who are thrown together by their work, don’t initially respect each other’s qualities, but then come to do so. The movie is full of violence and has no romantic interest. Mel appreciated the character of Martin, a suicidal loner, a Vietnam veteran whose wife had died, and whose world has fallen apart. Being a very private person, he could empathize with the part. Danny Glover is a method actor, which meant his approach to acting was totally different from Mel’s, but nonetheless the two leads got on reasonably well together. Their different approaches mirrored the differences between the characters they played one more off the hip, one more reflective, thereby achieving the intention of the director, Richard Donner of Superman fame. Donner had been worried that Mel would cause problems during production. In the event, Mel was highly professional. Having benefited from his break, and with Robyn there, he stayed on the wagon. Robyn left shortly after the film’s completion, but Mel stayed on in his Santa Monica flat. He soon started to drink again; beer resumed its place in his life, and there were rumors that he was enjoying some dates.

During the Cannes Film Festival of 1987, which he attended to promote Lethal Weapon, Mel had to engage in typical ‘star’ activities such as setting his palm in concrete. He was also the focus of attention of several women, some of whom were rich and powerful. It seems as if he found the glitz and glamour all too much; he retired from his hotel to a yacht Jerry Weintraub had chartered, and gave himself over to the bottle. Eventually, he had had enough and asked Pat Lovell to arrange for his immediate return to Sydney and the family.

Lethal Weapon, in its three installments, did amazingly well at the box office, peaking at $300 million for Lethal Weapon 3 in 1992. Critically, the reaction was mixed. The level of violence was extremely high and the movies provoked much debate as to whether celluloid violence was imitated on the street. The argument still runs, as effects get ever more realistic and gory. Still, the public clearly has an appetite for violence as the success of films such as the Terminator series or Robocop make all too clear. Whether it is better to portray violence in a fantasy world or in ugly reality as in Lethal Weapon, is at the heart of the issue.

Mel’s partnership with Pat Lovell came to an end in January 1989, when Mel formed a production company in Los Angeles. Lovell was eventually paid $1 for her share in the folded company. Ed Limato’s strenuous efforts to keep Mel in the US seemed to be paying off. In 1990 Bill Shannahan died. He had been a mentor as well as an agent for Mel and had made an effort to keep Mel working in Australia. During the late eighties, though, Mel’s particular wish was to work in a comedy film. It was not just that Paul Hogan was so successful in Crocodile Dundee, it was also because he didn’t wish to be stereotyped and wanted to extend his acting range. Such a project never came up.

At the time when Lethal Weapon was released, Mel had his first flirtation with politics. While not eligible to vote in Australia because of his American passport, he clearly feels that it is his adopted land, and has an interest in issues there. The person he chose to support in 1987 was Robert Taylor, a fundamentalist conservative. People turned up to the rallies, presumably to see Mel rather than listen to Taylor’s extreme pronouncements. Liberal Australia, as represented by the quality press, found Mel’s association unusual. Mel was perhaps taking after his father, the man for whom the Roman Catholic Church was too liberal. Two years later he was to support Barry Tattersall, another independent candidate during the federal elections, and express views such as support of capital punishment, loathing of high taxation and government intervention and the moral decline of the West.

After the success of Lethal Weapon, the offers flooded in for work. Mel was even offered a role in the long-running soap Dallas, at the instigation of Victoria Principal. (Of course, she had no idea of Mel’s deep-seated aversion to TV work, whatever the money.) Mel bought a house in Malibu after the second Lethal Weapon film, as Los Angeles was becoming his base, and his loyalties were shifting from Australia to the USA. There has been some slight resentment in Australia at this shift. Naturally, Australians like to regard Mel as one of their own because he had become so Australianised and began his successful career there. But Mel has never given up his American passport and the USA is his native country. And though Mel had resisted the lures of Tinsel town, Hollywood is renowned for sucking people in and keeping them there, at least so long as they are successful. Also as the children grow older, Robyn has insisted that they need to be educated in one place, which currently means staying in Los Angeles.

The next project Mel accepted was Tequila Sunrise. Mel played an erstwhile drug dealer, despite having refused such a role in earlier days when he stated that it was morally offensive to him. His character, Dale McKussic, has effectively reformed by the start of the film, and the story revolves around his confrontation with an old school friend who is in the drugs squad, including rivalry for the attentions of Michelle Pfeiffer. The film received mixed reviews, partly because reviewers found it hard to believe that an ex-drugs dealer was a suitable hero for a romantic comedy. It’s box office receipts in the USA were less than half those of Lethal Weapon.

Kurt Russell played opposite Mel in Tequila Sunrise, and the two became good friends. Russell’s partner is Goldie Hawn who effectively started her career in the sixties’ comedy series Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in where she played a preternaturally dumb blonde, a role in which she was to some extent typecast thereafter. A new project was put together for Mel and Goldie, Bird on a Wire. This was a fairly brainless chase movie, but it did quite well, earning the same as Lethal Weapon in the USA. When Bird on a Wire was over, Mel headed back to Australia for some well-deserved rest on his farm.

THE ESTABLISHED STAR
In 1987 some of the British tabloids began to spread rumors that Mel was dating Cassandra Kirton, an English girl he had met in Los Angeles. Another story dating to late 1986 links him with Miranda Brewin, another English girl he had met in Sydney. Mel threatened legal action and the papers retracted. Both girls denied that anything untoward had happened; they had just enjoyed boozy evenings where Mel relaxed.

These stories were followed up by articles in an American tabloid, the Globe, in 1993, which carried pictures of Mel allegedly fooling around with sonic women in a bar in Modesto, California. Mel’s lawyers threatened the Globe with a lawsuit, though this never materialized. As a result of the latter incident Mel decided that his drinking was getting out of hand, and that the publication of these sorts of stories did his marriage no good. In the middle of 1 991 he had enrolled with Alcoholics Anonymous, as Ed Limato and Robyn were both very concerned about the effect alcohol might have on his career, and after the Modesto escapade, he attended more AA meetings while continuing to fulfill his obligations on set. Furthermore, the mood in the US and in Hollywood in particular, was growing hostile to alcohol. Mel’s visits to AA meetings were reported in the Sunday Mirror on 15 September 1991, after unsuccessful attempts by Limato to raise an injunction for breach of privacy. (It is a poor reflection on somebody that his attendance was ever tipped off to the papers — the second ‘A’ in AA is supposed to be sacrosanct.)

Shooting for Mel’s next major project, Air America, began in early 1990. The film was based on the activities of the CIA in running an airline into Laos during the Vietnam War. The CIA, with typical deviousness where covert operations were concerned, transported anything it thought would help the war effort — drugs, arms, whatever. This secret war, hidden from the American people, became a major scandal when it was revealed.

Filming was done near the Golden Triangle, the notorious drug-growing area in the north of Thailand and Laos. Robyn and the family came to join Mel for a while and this helped keep him calm during the making of the film. The cast and crew were working in isolated jungle conditions, with all the discomfort this implies mosquitoes, days of torrential rain, basic accommodation. The actors and crew also had to be protected by their Thai colleagues from swarms of prostitutes. Robyn left after a while, as she wanted to have their sixth child back in Australia. Mel reverted to his usual pattern of heavy drinking, getting into arguments, waking up bad-tempered, often feeling guilty with post-alcohol depression about what he might have got up to the night before. This ended after Robyn had given birth to Milo and returned a few weeks later to Thailand. Mel was relieved when shooting was over and he could return to Australia to be with his family and newborn son.

The net result of all this discomfort was not a success. The producers wanted a more cheerful ending after seeing the final product, as if failing to recognize that Air America dealt with a sordid period in US foreign policy, whatever the individual bravery and morality of the pilots involved. A different ending was patched on, with Mel doing the final scenes in Shepperton Studios. Many veterans of the real Air America thought that the film trivialized their efforts and complained vociferously.

After the poor showing of Air America, Mel’s next project was as different as it could possibly be. Twenty years before Franco Zeffirelli had made a successful film version of Romeo and Juliet, starring two virtual unknowns, Simon Ward and Jane Seymour. This had been an unexpected runaway success. Since then, he had made The Taming of the Shrew, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, which had done moderately well. Zeffirelli was renowned for a somewhat lavish approach to Shakespeare, which did not always fare well with the critics, even if audiences enjoyed it. Zeffirelli persuaded Mel to star in a movie version of Hamlet. The budget for the film was substantial — $15 million most of which reputedly came from Warner Brothers as they were keen to sign Mel to a long—term contract. News of Mel’s reincarnation as the Prince of Denmark was greeted with virtual incredulity. Not all of his roles had been rich in dialogue, and here he was, about to embark on a project that was 99 per cent dialogue, 1 per cent action. Furthermore, the cast included some highly respected names — Glenn Close, Alan Bates, Ian Holm and Helena Bonham-Garter.

Mel became utterly absorbed in the part. It had been forgotten or not known by many who laughed at him, that he had already been in several well—received serious stage productions. Indeed, if it weren’t for the money to be made in films, the stage would have had more of his time. But this was his first venture into film for the type of audience that attends the serious theatre. He was aware of the possible reaction of such an audience and it added to the tension he felt at playing the part. But despite any initial reservations they may have had, his fellow actors came to respect Mel’s performance. He was glad, though, when shooting came to an end.

Unusually, Mel threw himself enthusiastically into promoting the film, entirely changing his demeanor to the press. The only difficult part for him was that his mother died in December 1990, just before the US release, and he was disappointed that she would never see him in the sort of role to which he had always aspired. Nevertheless, he soldiered on with the film’s promotion after returning to Australia for her funeral.

The period before Hamlet’s review by the press must have been nail biting for Mel. Whatever an actor puts into a performance, he can never truly guess the reaction of the critics. He needn’t have worried. The reviews in the US were almost entirely favorable and most Australian critics applauded it. Reservations were strongest in the UK, where it was felt that Mel’s interpretation was a little wooden, solid but missing the nuances. Whatever one’s view, it did help to popularize Shakespeare, and was a worthy project to undertake. He didn’t receive an Oscar for the part but he was given a Will Award by the Shakespeare Theatre, Washington. After Hamlet, Mel headed off to his farm in Australia for a long, well—earned rest. (Mel is interested in farming, like his father had been, and has also bought a ranch in Montana to rear organic beef)

In the meantime, Hollywood had moved on. Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves had become a phenomenal success, and Mel wanted to find a project that would keep him in the same league (the two had met several years earlier at Cannes, when Mel’s pulling power with producers was far ahead of Costner’s; Mel had also been offered the part of Robin Hood in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which Costner had taken). Although Mel’s next piece of work was Lethal Weapon 3, which grossed over $160 million in the US, he was seeking something new to broaden his acting range. The project Mel came up with was Forever Young, where the hero is cryogenically preserved for 50 years, before coming out to face a strange world. The film was lightweight, but nonetheless did well enough at the box office to prove Mel’s drawing power.

In February 1991, Warner Brothers signed a $42 million deal with Mel for a four-film partnership. Mel would also get royalties and his production company, Icon Productions, would produce the films. Mel also wanted to direct, and got his chance in The Man without a Face, in which he both directed and acted. He played a burns victim who makes friends with a small boy, until small-minded townsfolk drive him off. Mel enjoys working with children and has a much more natural manner with them than most other actors. (Over the years Mel has also been involved in charitable work for children.) The film was well reviewed after its release in 1993.

Mel achieved a long-held desire to act in a Western in his next film. The Western was undergoing something of a renaissance with Glint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, often described as the final Western (like the novel, pundits are always predicting the genre’s demise) and Costner’s Dances with Wolves both doing fantastically well. The subject Mel chose was Maverick, which had been a TV series in the sixties. He hired William Goldman, who had been responsible for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to script the project and he acquired the services of Richard Donner of the Lethal Weapon series to direct. The story revolves around the attempts of gambler Brett Maverick and Annabelle Bransford (played by Jodie Foster) to raise money to enter a gambling competition. James Garner, the original star of the TV series, plays Zane Cooper, who attempts to thwart Maverick’s efforts and steal his girlfriend. It was released in the summer of 1994.

Randall Wallace's script Braveheart, the story of a 13th century Scottish clanman's war fro liberty against England's ruthless King Edward I, was submitted to Icon Productions in the hopes of getting a commitment from Mel to star. But after reading the script, Mel felt he had to tell the story as well, for he kept reworking scenes from it in his head. "That’s a pretty good indication you should probably direct it, if you’re building images and sequences in your head," he revealed in a promotional film for the movie.

A lover of films since his youth, Gibson had a special affinity for what he calls "the big ones like The Big Country, that western, and Spartacus, the huge, epic films. They were what inspired me to do Braveheart." To overcome the many pressures of mounting such a complex production and wearing so many hats, Gibson took to walking about the sets with a book in his hand bearing the gag title "A Beginner’s Guide to Directing the Epic."

What inspired him to make the film also was the character the script was about, a somewhat obscure Scottish national hero named William Wallace (no relation to screenwriter, Randall Wallace, as far as the latter knows). "[William] Wallace was truly interested in liberty and loved his country and really wanted to be free and wanted freedom for his fellows," Gibson said. "But at the same time, he was kind of a savage. At the Battle of Stirling, he skinned the commanding officer on the other side and turned him into a belt." The part of Wallace was the lead, but a character role as well, one that would stretch the audience’s support and thus tailor-made for the star.

Wallace’s rage against the British tyrants was motivated as well by their murder of his wife. This prompted Gibson to wryly start calling the character "Mad Mac;" Mad Max’s call to arms was motivated by a similar tragedy.

Budgeted at $55.5 million (with Gibson again taking a fraction of his then $15-mil-lion-per-picture superstar’ salary to get the film made), Braveheart (1995) was shot in Scotland and Ireland with a cast of what looks on the screen like thousands, even though it isn’t. Extras for the enormous battle scenes were conscripted from Ireland’s army reserve forces due to the need for extras who were not only disciplined in functioning like an army but physically up to the film’s rigorous and dangerous stunt work.

While the battle scenes are not the sum and substance of Braveheart, they rank among the film’s most memorable set pieces because of their extraordinary staging and uncompromisingly vivid brutality. This is especially true of the film’s major battle scene on the plains of Stirling, where Wallace and his band of savages successfully defeated the English forces. The scene took six weeks to shoot.

To prepare for it, Gibson says he looked at all the great battle scenes in films he could lay his hands on—films such as Spartacus (1960) and Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1967). "[I wanted] to see the kind of territory that’s been covered and then go further with it," he said, "and really get the feeling of what it must be like to be in the middle of a thirteenth-century battle. To get the smell of it."

He captured more than the smell of it; before submitting the film to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for classification, he toned down the graphic bloodshed both to avoid an NC-17 rating and not gross audiences out. "I didn’t really know [how gory the film was] until I showed it to an audience and they were going for the vomit bags and getting up and walking out," he told an interviewer after the film’s release. "You don’t want that; you want people to stay with it."

What he wanted most was for moviegoers to be so moved by the film emotionally that they couldn’t talk after the lights went up. "I hope that they’re so moved and so... inspired by it, that’s all," he said. "That they’ve watched this great story and they’ve found something in themselves."

Released early in 1995 to high commercial expectations, given Gibson’s following and the fact that the film was both a love story and an action epic, Braveheart initially performed below these expectations at the box office. But it had legs. It would move out of one theater, to be replaced by the next hot new release, only to move to another one or return to the same theater later for a second run. Word of mouth steadily built, and by the end of the year the film had become a hit, albeit not one of that year’s, or Gibson’s, biggest.

Braveheart received numerous awards, including the Golden Globe (for Best Picture) for Gibson, a foreshadowing of things to come when the Oscar nominations were announced in February 1996. The film received multiple nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture. When the envelopes were opened at the Academy Awards ceremony that April, Gibson’s name and Braveheart were inside.

In his acceptance speech for the directing award, Gibson offered the customary thank yous to family, friends, and collaborators. Then he went on to express his thanks to every director he ever worked with. "They were my film school," he added, then observing wryly, "and now that I’m a bona fide director with a golden boy, I, well, like most directors, I suppose what I really want to do is act." The remark brought the house down, though it is my belief thatwhat most directors really, really, want to do is write.

By 1996, Mel Gibson’s asking price per film had skyrocketed to $20 million, placing him in the top salary tier of male superstars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Tom Hanks. Producers feel the price is a bargain, given the collective box-office receipts of Gibson’s films worldwide. For a long time, he had had his choice of roles and could be very choosy about them—but now even more so.

Gibson turned down the lead part of dapper John Steed in a planned big-screen version of the classic TV spy-spoof series The Avengers, feeling neither suited for the part nor interested in it, for the character of Steed lacked the qualities he looks for in a lead role. Earlier, he had been in the running to be the new James Bond after Roger Moore left the series and on the A-list again when Timothy Dalton was unceremoniously dumped after two post-Moore Bond films. But he turned the lucrative Bond offers down each time for the same reasons he’d rejected playing John Steed.

Instead, he elected to make his debut as a $20 million megastar in Ron Howard’s Ransom (1996). The film was a remake of the 1956 film of the same name which had starred Glenn Ford and Donna Reed as parents whose son is kidnapped after which the father places a bounty on the kidnapper’s heads to get the boy back. Ironically, the script of the earlier film had been cowritten by Richard Maibaum, chief scriptwriter of numerous James Bond films. The new version was updated by Alexander Ignon and novelist-screenwriter Richard Price, with Mel Gibson and René Russo taking the Ford and Reed roles.

Gibson says he decided to take the role of the desperate father in Ransom because the character shared the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of Mad Max and even William Wallace, who are similarly spurred to action when confronted by an act of violence against their families. Unlike them, however, Tom Mullen, Gibson’s family man turned avenger, is neither a superhero nor a larger-than-life figure, though he is rich and powerful, which makes his initial helplessness in the tense situation all the more difficult for him to deal with. In fact, worrying the character might appear too competent and thus lose audience identification, Gibson urged screenwriter Richard Price to play down Mullen’s self-confidence and play up his self-doubt even more in subsequent drafts. "To me, it’s interesting to see him [Mullen] in a corner biting the chair," the actor told Cinescape magazine.

The point where Mullen finally decides to stop biting the chair, get out of the corner, and cut loose on his own to get his son back is intended to be even more electrifying and audience involving precisely because of the character’s carefully etched feelings of helplessness and uncertainty. In many ways it mirrors the moment when Fletcher Christian at last erupts against Captain Bligh in The Bounty—and for many of the same reasons.

Gibson also had a hand in writing some of the script himself. Perhaps inspired by a similar sequence in the Clint Eastwood action movie Dirty Harry, Gibson and an assistant came up with a lengthy chase scene in which the kidnapper puts Gibson’s stressed-out character through a rigorous workout, sending him from one spot to another during the ransom drop and forcing him to reach each spot in record time—or else.
Ransom provided Mel Gibson a welcome break from the demanding responsibilities of being both before and behind the cameras. Not that just simply appearing in the film was free of difficulties. To make the action scenes look real, Gibson had to perform numerous, and dangerous, stunts himself, ranging from sidestepping treacherous New York City traffic to jumping over taxicab hoods. Behind the scenes, he also suffered a headlined bout of appendicitis, which resulted in his being rushed to a New York City hospital for emergency surgery, halting production for a week. For his performance, he received a Golden Globe nomination in the Best Actor In a Drama category, though he didn’t take home the prize. (Ironically, the winner, Geoffrey Rush for Shine, had once been a roommate of Gibson’s during the superstar’s early stage-acting days in Australia.)

Gibson has so far resisted the efforts of Warner Bros. and director Richard Donner to sign him for a fourth installment of the popular Lethal Weapon series. Entertainment Weekly reported that the studio offered him $25 million to reprise the character of Riggs one more time, while Variety, the show-biz Bible, said the offer ran as high as $30 million, a salary that would make Mel Gibson the highest-paid actor in history.
A first-draft script of Lethal Weapon 4 has been written by Jonathan Lemkin, whose previous credits include the screenplay for the 1993 Sylvester Stallone actioner Demolition Man. Allegedly, it brings back René Russo’s Lorna Cole character for another go-around with Gibson’s Riggs and Danny Glover’s Murtaugh but this time drops Joe Pesci’s Leo Getz character. Gibson’s agent has said that the actor has not ruled out the prospect of appearing in a Lethal Weapon 4 and is willing to look at any and all scripts for the vehicle, but Gibson has publicly expressed exhaustion with the character of Riggs and the opinion that the character and the series have been taken about as far as each will go. Danny Glover feels much the same way and has so far also declined to appear in a fourth installment, adding that he’s more interested in pursuing other career directions and not repeating himself in a piece of material that has "already been done so well."

Keeping true to his word that he just wants to act for a while, Gibson chose to star rather than direct and star in his next film, Conspiracy Theory, and turned over the directorial reins to his old pal Donner, with whom the actor has developed a strong personal and professional rapport. Like Gibson, Donner is not inclined to take life too seriously on or off the set, Gibson says, adding that Donner, too, is just a "big kid" at heart.

An action-comedy in the vein of the Lethal Weapon series and thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s Man Who Knew Too Much (1954), with a dash of Hitchcock’s 39 Steps (1935) thrown in for good measure, Conspiracy Theory features Gibson as a paranoid New York City cabdriver named Jerry Fletcher who poses endless conspiracy theories over the Internet, one of which, involving a shadow group within the FBI, turns out to be true. With villain Patrick Stewart closing in to silence him, Gibson does a twist on his Ransom character and becomes the pursued rather than the pursuer as he runs for his life. Julia Roberts plays the girl on the run with him in the lighthearted adventure.

While making Conspiracy Theory, Gibson proposed making a film version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a cautionary science-fiction novel about censorship and book burning that he would both star in and direct. One can see why the book would appeal to him, for its main character, a fireman named Montag who ferrets out books deemed harmful to society by his totalitarian masters and puts them to the torch, has much in common with other Gibson heroes, notably Braveheart’s William Wallace. Eventually, the character rebels and becomes an interim leader who enables subsequent generations to preserve their intellectual freedom. Bradbury himself, as well as screenwriters Terry Puryear and Terry K. Hayes, have drafted scripts for the film, which is still in the planning stages.

The novel was filmed once before, in 1967, by director Francois Truffaut; it starred Julie Christie and Oskar Werner (in the role of Montag). Gibson considers the Truffaut film a missed opportunity and is not alone in calling it "dull and humorless," qualities he hopes to reverse in the remake. Nevertheless, the Truffaut film has since achieved cult status, largely due to its hauntingly beautiful music score by Bernard Herrmann. Gibson would do well to consider reprising Herrmann’s score for his remake, as Martin Scorsese did when he remade the 1962 film Cape Fear (also scored by Herrmann) in 1991.

Also on Gibson’s directing agenda for a brief time was a proposed big-screen remake of the oft-filmed Leo Tolstoy classic Anna Karenina, to be made under the banner of Gibson’s Icon Productions. Gibson opted not to direct, and the project was shelved while he involved himself in other things (among them Conspiracy Theory), then finally green-lighted with Bernard Rose (who had made Immortal Beloved for Icon) in the director’s chair. French actress Sophie Marceau, Gibson’s costar in Braveheart, was cast in the title role as Tolstoy’s doomed heroine who loves neither too wisely nor too well. The film was released in the spring of 1997.

(More on his most recent movies 'Payback', 'Million Dollar Hotel', 'The Patriot' and 'What Women Want' coming soon!)

For now it seems that Mel Gibson is, as he has maintained, content to just act for others and be one of the guys on his films rather than guide every stage of production. In fact, this is how Gibson’s coworkers - above-the-line talent, technicians, and lowly extras alike - tend to describe him. Whether acting, directing, or being a superstar, they say he always comes across as just "one of the guys."

Which is the nature of Mel Gibson’s unique and enduring appeal to audiences as well.

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