Way before Russell,
Cate and Hugh
Jackman, even before Geoffrey
Rush and Sam Neill, the Antipodes could boast of a mega-star in the
Hollywood firmament. One of the brightest, in fact. For, if you discount
Schwarzenegger on the grounds of his cartoonish build and accent, Mel
Gibson has been the biggest action hero of recent times. Furthermore,
when Mel decided to produce, direct and star in his OWN action movie, he
even snapped up a couple of Oscars - a very, very rare occurrence in the
genre.
Yet Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson isn't, strictly speaking, Australian at
all. He was born on the 3rd of January, 1956, in Peekskill, New York,
the sixth of eleven children. His father, Hutton, was a brakeman for New
York Central Railroad and, considering New York City no place to raise
children, moved the family north to Croton-on-Hudson, then on to nearby
Verplanck Point and, by 1961, on to a farmhouse at Mount Vision. Times
were hard and Hutton figured he'd run the farm and do his rail job too.
So he spent weekdays in New York City while the family (isolated by
mother Anne's inability to drive) stuck out on the farm. It was tough,
but a great place to be a kid.
In 1964, disaster struck when Hutton suffered a serious work accident
and lost his job. The Gibsons were forced to move into cheap rented
accommodation, with the older children having to take jobs, while Hutton
entered into a compensation battle with the company. It would take three
years to work out. When it did, though, it worked out well. Hutton was a
strict and traditional Catholic - having at one point studied for the
priesthood - and did not really approve of the cultural changes in the
Sixties, regarding the hippies' penchant for mind-expansion and
promiscuity as a sad sign of moral decline. Consequently, when he won
$145,000 compensation, and a further $21,000 from the Jeopardy! gameshow
(very bright, the Gibsons), he decided to take the family to Australia,
Anne's homeland (her mother had been an opera singer who'd emigrated to
the States).
It's been said that the Gibsons moved to
escape the draft for Vietnam. Not true. Hutton had served in WW2 and
truly despised war, but his sons could still have been drafted from
Australia. Indeed, Mel's eldest brother WAS drafted, only to fail the
initial tests. Also, Anne had an extended family there which would
surely help as Hutton recovered from the accident.
So, off they went, via Ireland, Scotland, England and Rome, where the
kids were shown their Celtic heritage (Mel's the name of an Irish saint
- and it's NOT Melvin) and spent time at the Vatican. They arrived in
Australia in November of 1968 and settled in a suburb north of Sydney.
Mel was sent to St Leo's College, run by the Christian Brothers, where
he was picked on mercilessly for his accent. Rebelling against the
repressive regime, he got "whacked around for smoking, fighting,
not following their stupid rules". Eventually, Hutton pulled him
out and sent him to a state school - Asquith High - where he became a
proper Aussie bloke, drinking , brawling and the rest. He did date a
little, but usually with his mates along, being extremely shy.
After school, he thought of the priesthood, then journalism, but he had
no genuine vocation, ending up employed at an orange juice bottling
plant in Sydney. His sister Sheila, though, was a big admirer of Mel's
elaborately staged jokes, his talent for mimicry and his ability with
accents - he had, after all, learned to speak 'Strine. So, she filled in
an application form for him to join the National Institute of Dramatic
Arts, at the University of New South Wales. Mel went along and, somehow,
was accepted.
It wasn't easy to begin with. Mel didn't take it seriously and so
suffered the disapproval of students who did. He grew his hair and a
beard and did all those Seventies things that have very little to do
with disciplined work. He moved out of his parents' home to share a flat
with three other guys. You can imagine%u2026
But, after a while, he began to make an effort, conquering the terrible
stage fright that had seen him have to sit down during his first ever
performance. Playing Romeo alongside fellow student Judy Davis, he was a
real success. With his hair and beard removed, people began to take
notice of his extraordinary good looks. He shared a flat with Geoffrey
Rush and began to exhibit some of Rush's flair and enthusiasm for
theatre.
At the end of 1976, Mel and his student-buddy Steve Bisley (Bisley would
appear, as Goose, in Mel's breakthrough hit Mad Max) met producer Phil
Avalon and found themselves cast in the lightweight surfer movie Summer
City. They were paid the union minimum of $400 but it was experience,
and fun. Mel enjoyed a relationship with co-star Deborah Foreman who,
once it was over, was reported to have attempted suicide at a boozy
party.
The movie was a success in one respect.
Mel was taken on by agent Bill Shannahan, who scored him a part in The
Sullivans. This was good exposure, but Mel hated TV work, believing time
constraints meant little genuinely good work was done. To learn his
craft, he joined the South Australia Theatre Company and toured with
Waiting For Godot. When renting a room in Adelaide, he entered the
kitchen one day to find a pretty young woman, a dental assistant named
Robyn Moore, making breakfast. She had a boyfriend then but, by June of
1980 she and Mel would be married, now having seven children.
Now Shannahan really came good. He got Mel an audition for the producer
director George Miller, then casting for a futuristic feast of
ultraviolence called Mad Max. The night before, Mel got drunk at a party
(as he often did) and became involved in a fight with three other men.
They pounded him good and proper, and he showed up at the audition with
stitches in his head, his nose all over the place and his jaw out of
line. Incredibly, he was the perfect Max Rockatansky - possibly the most
severely battered hero in screen history.
The filming was hard. With a budget of just a few hundred thousand, the
cast and crew all lived in the same house, and all helped out moving
equipment. And it came off. Mel shone as a cop whose wife and kid are
run down and killed by a fearsome motor-gang led by The Toecutter. This,
as the title suggests, makes him mad, and he goes after them, giving his
final victim the choice of either dying in an inferno or cutting his own
foot off. Boosted by word-of-mouth rumours that it was exceptionally
brutal - remember, this was Video Nasty time, when many films were
benefiting from being banned - Mad Max was a sensation, taking over $100
million.
Unfazed, Mel continued his stage education, appearing in Oedipus Rex and
Henry IV. Always keen to expand his repertoire, he also starred in Tim,
written by Colleen McCullough. Here he played a labourer of
below-average intelligence who's befriended by older woman Piper Laurie.
Choosing to highlight his character's innocence, rather than his
disability, Gibson was charming and convincing, and won the Best Actor
Award from the Australian Film Institute.
Now came more stage-work, and then the war movie Attack Force Z, a bad
experience. Mel was disappointed that director Philip Noyce (later to
make Dead Calm and Patriot Games) had left the project and, like the
rest of a cast including Sam Neil, was also annoyed at the
star-treatment meted out to John Philip Law. After filming ended in
Thailand, he returned to Australia and, now married and needing the
money, took a part in the prison drama Punishment.
Thank the Lord, matters quickly improved.
Peter Weir, who'd helped re-generate the Aussie film industry with his
marvellous Picnic At Hanging Rock, wanted Mel to star alongside newcomer
Mark Lee in the war drama, Gallipoli. The pair would play young
sprinters whose athletic careers are halted when they're sent into
action in Turkey during WW1. The army uses their talents by having them
race through the trenches with important messages, while the British
commanders are foolishly and mercilessly sending troops over the top
into unanswerable machine-gun fire. It was an extremely moving movie,
and not the last time Mel would be involved in Brit-bashing. Both
Braveheart and The Patriot would also portray the denizens of this
sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden
- DEMI-PARADISE - as a gang of plummy-voiced butchers. He'd answer
outraged complaints with a cute and funny "Hey, we're giving the
Germans a break". In Australia, of course, it didn't matter.
Gallipoli won Gibson a second Best Actor Award.
Next came another monster hit, as he returned to Mad Max. In The Road
Warrior, we see Max years after the original killing and revenge,
wandering the desolate landscape with a hound whose food he selfishly
gobbles himself. No semblance of law remains and a community of nice
people is under siege by a fantastically dangerous horde of punky
marauders. Will Max help them escape with their fuel? Not a chance. At
least not until - thanks to the marauders - all his bones are broken and
his eyes are popping out of his head.
Mad Max 2, undoubtedly one of the best and most exciting action films
ever made, was another massive hit and made Gibson a star in America.
But, rather than go down the action hero route (he'd turn down a part in
The Running Man), he chose to play a reporter in Indonesia when
revolution struck in 1965, in Peter Weir's The Year Of Living
Dangerously. Here he had an onscreen affair with Sigourney Weaver (they
had to raise his shoes for this, though Mel, at 5'9", is not
short). Linda Hunt, as his crazy, tiny photographer, would win an Oscar.
From here, Mel moved on to The Bounty, playing Fletcher Christian to Anthony
Hopkins' Captain Bligh. The cast featured the cream of the British
and Irish crop - Laurence Olivier, Edward Fox, Liam Neeson, Daniel
Day-Lewis, plus stalwarts like Bernard Hill and Philip Davis and,
further down the bill, John Sessions and Neil Morrissey.
The movie was filmed on Moorea, an island near Tahiti, and the shoot was
marked by some serious drinking sessions. When away from his family (the
kids were coming regularly now), Mel would hit the sauce with abandon.
It was reported that, on one occasion, he got into another bar brawl and
was so badly bruised they had to change the order of shooting. A year or
so later, he'd be charged with drinking and driving, receiving a three
month ban and a $300 fine. Like many very shy people, Mel found life to
be more fun and himself to be more gregarious after a few drinks. But it
became a problem and, by the early Nineties, he'd entered a programme to
sort himself out.
After The Bounty came the first movie
where Mel adopted an American accent, when he and Sissy Spacek battled
to keep their farm in The River (Spacek would be Oscar-nominated). Then,
once again trying to steer clear of action parts, he played a jailbird
helped to escape by besotted warden's wife Diane Keaton in Mrs Soffel
(helmed by Aussie director Gillian Armstrong). After this came Mad Max
3: Beyond Thunderdome, a fairly weak sequel that featured Tina Turner
and, more interestingly, Angelo Rossitto - a dwarf from the brilliant
Freaks - as The Master.
Now came another monster, Lethal Weapon, the first of a series of four.
This was a superior buddy movie, with Gibson playing maverick cop Martin
Riggs, constantly taunting the more conservative partner, family man
Danny Glover. But it wasn't JUST a buddy movie. One of the opening
scenes, where Riggs has lost his wife and is contemplating suicide, saw
Mel deliver a truly moving performance, excellent by anyone's standards.
With the financial proceeds from his last two movies, Mel bought a
300-acre cattle ranch in the Kiewa Valley in northern Victoria, then a
house in Malibu, so he wouldn't have to be away from his family so much,
and the kids could stick to the same school.
After Lethal Weapon came Tequila Sunrise, where Mel played a drug dealer
pursued by an old friend, now a policeman (played by Kurt Russell), with
the pair of them falling for restaurant use Michelle
Pfeiffer. Gibson and Russell would become great friends and Mel,
who'd been seeking a strong comedy for some years, now made Bird On A
Wire with Russell's wife, Goldie Hawn. Then came another war flick, Air
America.
With the Lethal Weapon franchise now in full swing, this was enough
action for a while. Gibson turned down the lead in Robin Hood: Prince Of
Thieves (he also turned down the role of James Bond, TWICE - after Roger
Moore had departed, and then after Timothy Dalton), and took on
Shakespeare's finest, Hamlet. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and
co-starring such heavyweights as Glenn Close, Alan Bates and Paul
Schofield, the movie was a huge risk for Gibson. Some critics jeered,
unable to accept that Mad Max might dare to follow in the footsteps of
Olivier, but Gibson really was good, more than holding his own in
terrifying company.
And he kept on with his
"interesting" projects. Next came the tear-jerking Forever
Young, where he played a man frozen for fifty years, then woken up by
Elijah Wood (later Frodo Baggins in The Lord Of The Rings). Then he
played alongside another kid in Man Without A Face, where he played a
horribly scarred recluse who becomes a young boy's mentor. Importantly,
this was also Mel's first directing experience - the thoroughly unlikely
practice run for Braveheart.
Mel had formed a production company,
called Icon, and had signed a $42 million, four-picture deal with
Warners and got moving fast. Mel's love of opera (inherited from his
gran, probably) and classical music led Icon to produce Immortal
Beloved. Later, they'd make Anna Karenina, 187 and Fairy Tale: A Love
Story, the last of which would see Mel turn up in the last shot as the
little heroine's daddy, returned from the war. First, though, there was
the Mel-starring Maverick, written by William Goldman and directed by
Lethal Weapon's Richard Donner.
But it was Icon's next production that made Mel undeniably the biggest
star in Hollywood. Randall Wallace (later to write Mel's We Were
Soldiers), sent a script to Icon concerning William Wallace, a Scottish
hero who, partly for freedom's sake and partly due to the brutalizing of
his wife, went to war with Edward I and nearly won. Mel, who'd always
love epics like Spartacus, went for it. The wife angle was familiar too,
with Gibson taking to calling his character Mad Mac. As said, aside from
the infinitely smaller Man Without A Face, Gibson had little experience
of directing, and none of directing on this scale - and he knew it.
Filming in Ireland, he took to carrying around a book he'd had made,
titled A Beginner's Guide To Directing The Epic. He had, though, done
his homework, studying the battle sequences in Kubrick's Spartacus and
Orson Welles' Chimes At Midnight. He knew what he wanted and, with the
help of the Irish army reserve, serving as extras, he got it.
Braveheart was a mighty achievement. Aided by great performances from
Gibson, Angus Macfadyen as Robert The Bruce and especially from Patrick
McGoohan as Edward Longshanks, it was invigorating, touching and
tremendously brutal. The battle sequences were amongst the best ever
filmed, and the story-telling was strong too. Gibson surprised everyone
- for action films are not traditionally the Academy's favourites - by
taking the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director.
Turning down the role of another Brit icon, Steed in The Avengers,
Gibson moved on to a string of huge hits. In Ransom he played a rich man
taking all manner of crazy risks to rescue his kidnapped daughter. In
Conspiracy Theory, co-starring Julia
Roberts (who he kept sending dried rats) and directed once again by
Richard Donner, he was a geek cabbie who gets drawn into a real CIA
plot. Then, after Lethal Weapon 4, where Martin Riggs was unfortunately
a parody of himself, there was the harsh and thrilling Payback, a remake
of Lee Marvin's Point Blank with Gibson as Porter, calmly and coldly
beating and threatening everyone till he gets his money back. Mel had
every right to be a bit tetchy - he suffered appendicitis during the
shoot and production was halted for a week while he was in hospital.
After this came Wim Wenders' more arty
The Million Dollar Hotel where Gibson played an FBI agent investigating
the bizarre occupants of run-down hostelry. The movie was apparently
based on the ideas of U2 singer Bono, his band having performed on top
of the same hotel when filming the video for Where The Streets Have No
Name. After this, Mel provided the voice of Rocky Rhodes The Rhode
Island Red Rooster in the animation Chicken Run (he'd earlier provided
the voice of John Smith in Disney's Pocahontas).
Now came two more Big Ones. In The Patriot, as Colonel Benjamin
"Ghost" Martin, he took on the English forces during the
American revolutionary war. The movie was a tad sentimental and borrowed
heavily from Michael Mann's superior Last Of The Mohicans. But audiences
lapped it up, as they did Mel's next offering, What Women Want. Here he
was ad exec Nick Marshall, a macho sexist who, having been electrocuted
in the bath, can suddenly hear what women are thinking. This, of course,
causes much hilarity, both in his "romantic" life and in his
relationship with his teenage daughter who's plotting her first sexual
experience. The movie made well over $300 million, and aside from
winning him a Golden Globe nomination (he'd also received one for
Ransom), it justified Mel's now incredible pay-packets. For The Patriot
he received a then-groundbreaking $25 million.
On he went to We Were Soldiers, the true story of a band of 400 elite US
soldiers surrounded by 2000 North Vietnamese in one of the bloodiest
conflicts of recent times. Like Saving Private Ryan, much of the movie
was an extended battle sequence, but it was searingly effective,
nonetheless. And there was also emotional weight added by Mel's
relationship with his screen wife, the excellent Madeleine Stowe.
After this, he took the lead in Signs, M. Night Shyamalan's follow-up to
The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. Here he played Father Graham Hess, an
Episcopal minister who discovers crop circles in his fields in Buck
County. But how did they get there? The media descends en masse and Hess
does some research of his own, discovering to his horror that, well, as
with all of Shyamalan's work, don't let anyone tell you the ending
before you've seen it. Signs was a grand reinvention of the modern
terror-flick and was another massive hit for Mel. Recouping a budget of
$62 million in its first weekend, it topped the box office charts, later
returning to the top for another two weeks. Soon passing the $200
million barrier, it was America's biggest summer hit, even outdoing
Goldmember.
Having been a star for twenty years, Mel
Gibson is now one of the biggest. Thankfully, he still works hard to
produce good material and, perhaps better still, refuses to take his
celebrity seriously. When voted The Sexiest Man Alive, for instance, he
said "That implies there are a lot of dead guys who got more points
than me". Various things keep his feet on the ground. There's his
religion - he remains a devout, traditional Catholic, attending mass in
Latin, and he's had a chapel built on his grounds.
There's his family to whom he is
vociferously devoted (his brother Donal is also an actor and has
appeared in many Mel films - Maverick, Braveheart, Conspiracy Theory and
Immortal Beloved). But perhaps it's mostly because of Australia. His
character was formed there, his career was launched there, and they know
it, in 1997 making him an Officer of the Order of Australia, the highest
award they have. So forget the beginning, the guy's obviously a fair
dinkum Aussie. ~ Dominic Wills
