Highest-Paid Actresses 2011

Actor, director, producer Mel Gibson Born on January 3, 1956, in Peekskill, New York. Gibson was the sixth of 11 children born to Hutton and Ann Gibson, who were Roman Catholics of Irish descent. Shortly after the onset of the Vietnam War, Hutton Gibson relocated his family to Australia for fear that his sons would be drafted into battle. Mel spent the remainder of his childhood in Sydney, where he attended an all-boys Catholic high school. 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. Mel Gibson was without doubt one of the biggest action heroes of the Eighties and Nineties. Furthermore, when he decided to produce, direct and star in his own action movie, Braveheart, he even snapped up a couple of Oscars - a very, very rare occurrence in the genre. Following this with his self-financed mega-hit The Passion Of The Christ and the epic Apocalypto, he even looked set to out-do Clint Eastwood and become the most successful actor-turned-director of modern times.

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. After a brief hiatus, Gibson returned to the screen with the blockbuster hit Lethal Weapon (1987), playing volatile cop, Martin Riggs, opposite Danny Glover's by-the-book character, Roger Murtaugh. The success of Lethal Weapon inspired three sequels - Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), all of which featured Glover and Gibson in their respective roles as good cop and bad cop.