With impossibly handsome, rugged features and brilliant blue eyes, Mel Gibson may have started out as just another pretty face, but since his screen debut in Summer City (1976), he has developed into an international star of great magnitude. Though he has played a wide variety of characters ranging from surfers to futuristic warriors to troubled teachers to dashing romantic leads to historical leaders, Gibson brings to each role a barely contained intensity coupled with a keen wit. Surprisingly for a true Hollywood giant, Gibson seems well-grounded and takes the brouhaha surrounding him with a wry grain of salt.
Though widely perceived to be an Australian — and sporting a thick enough accent to bear that out — Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson was born January 3, 1956 in Peekskill, New York to Irish Catholic parents (a railroad brakeman and an Australian opera singer respectively). One of eleven children, Gibson moved with his family to Australia in 1968, and quickly developed his Aussie speech after schoolmates teased him for his Yankee accent. Though originally desiring to become a journalist, Gibson studied drama at the National Institutes of Dramatic Art in Sydney, which he attended with such notables as Judy Davis. Initially, the young actor suffered from terrible stage fright, and was still a student when he appeared in Summer City. Following graduation, he found work playing small supporting roles with the South Australia Theatre Company.
In 1979, Gibson starred in two very different feature films. In the moving drama Tim, the 22-year-old actor played a mildly retarded handy man. The role won him a Sammy (one of the Australian entertainment industry’s highest accolades). In the other film, Mad Max, he played a leather-clad futuristic cop in a world nearly destroyed by nuclear war. His success with both roles made him a bright young star in Australia. He substantially furthered his career by starring in Peter Weir’s powerful WWI drama Gallipoli (1981) — which won him a second Sammy for “Best Actor″ — but it was not until Gibson appeared in Mad Max 2 (1981) that he achieved global popularity. His second collaboration with Weir, The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), in which Gibson played a callous reporter covering a bloody Indonesian coup, only bolstered his growing reputation. He made his Hollywood debut playing Fletcher Christian to Anthony Hopkin’s Captain Bligh in The Bounty, (1984) and then played a farmer opposite Sissy Spacek in the melodramatic The River (1984). Later that year, Gibson returned to Australia to play Mad Max one last time in the overblown Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) opposite singer Tina Turner.
Gibson then took a two-year break from filmmaking, but came back strong starring opposite Danny Glover in Richard Donner’s smash action picture Lethal Weapon. Gibson’s wild-man portrayal of officer Martin Riggs, a volatile man who lost the will to live following his wife’s death, made him the perfect foil for Glover’s more low-key character. The honest chemistry between the leads made the film one of the year’s big box-office draws and in turn made Gibson a superstar. He reprised the role of Riggs in three “Lethal Weapon” sequels. Until 1990, Gibson was noted for his action roles, romantic heroes and contemporary dramatic characters. Therefore it was a shock for audiences to see him show up as Shakespeare’s tragic Danish prince in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990). His performance divided critics, winning over some even as it underwhelmed others, but many were impressed by Gibson’s audacity in taking the role in the first place.
In the early ’90s, Gibson further extended his range by founding his own production company, ICON Productions. Through it, he made his directorial debut with The Man Without A Face (1993), a drama in which he played a horribly burned teacher with a dark secret. Though a well-wrought, moving effort, it only had middling box-office success. He did better in 1994 in Richard Donner’s movie version of the popular television comedy-western Maverick. As a director/producer, Gibson swept the 1995 Oscars with Braveheart, his epic account of 13th-century Scottish leader William Wallace’s life and struggle to forge an independent nation. That same year, he also provided the speaking and singing voice to John Smith in Disney’s animated feature Pocahontas, and proved he could actually carry a tune.
Through the 1990s, Gibson’s popularity and reputation continued to grow, thanks to such films as Ransom (1996) and Conspiracy Theory (1997). In 1998, Gibson further increased this popularity with the success of two films, Lethal Weapon 4 and Payback. More success followed in 2000, due to the actor’s lead role as an animated rooster in Nick Park and Peter Lord’s hugely acclaimed Chicken Run, and to his work as the titular hero of Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster period epic The Patriot.
