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 the first magnitude. Though he has played a wide variety of roles 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. Though he is truly a Hollywood giant, Gibson seems well-grounded and takes the brouhaha surrounding him with a wry grain of salt.

Though originally hailed as an Australian -- and sporting a thick enough accent to bear that out -- Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson was born in Peekskill, New York to Irish Catholic parents, a railroad brakeman and an Australian opera singer respectively, one of eleven children. The Gibson family moved Down Under when Gibson was 12 -- he quickly developed his Aussie speech because the others 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. Initially, the young actor suffered from terrible stage fright. Gibson 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 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 hit actioner 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 made Gibson a superstar. He reprised the role of Riggs in two "Lethal Weapon" sequels. Up to 1990, Gibson was noted for his action roles, romantic heroes and his roles in contemporary dramas, therefore it was a shock for audiences to see him show up as Shakespeare's tragic Danish prince in Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990). They were even more surprised by the strength and vitality of his performance. In the early '90s, Gibson founded his own production company, ICON Productions. Through it, he made his directorial debut in 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 year, he provided the speaking and singing voice to John Smith in Disney's animated feature Pocahontas. His singing wasn't bad at all. Through the 1990s, Gibson's popularity and reputation for such films as Conspiracy Theory (1997) have continued growing. In 1998, he is scheduled to appear in a fourth version of "Lethal Weapon."