Mel Gibson

Mel Gibson was born in New York in 1956 and moved to Australia at the age of twelve, which handed him a useful double passport for the career that followed. He trained at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, finishing in 1977, and two years later George Miller cast him in Mad Max. The film cost very little and returned a great deal. Gallipoli in 1981 brought an Australian Film Institute award for Best Actor and proved the range extended past the windscreen.

Hollywood arrived properly in 1987 with Lethal Weapon. Martin Riggs was written as unstable and Gibson played him as genuinely so, which is both why the film worked and why three sequels followed. The more interesting move came alongside it: Franco Zeffirelli cast him as Hamlet in 1990, a decision widely treated as a joke beforehand and rather less so afterwards. By then he had already been named the first Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine, in 1985.

Directing was the real ambition. The Man Without a Face in 1993 was the trial run; Braveheart in 1995 was the argument. It took five Academy Awards in March 1996, two of them his - Best Picture as producer and Best Director - and it remains the work he is measured against. Maverick in 1994 and Ransom in 1996 kept the acting side commercial, the latter bringing a Golden Globe nomination, but the centre of gravity had moved decisively behind the camera.

The then-and-now here is professional rather than physical. Gibson directed Apocalypto in 2006 and then did not direct another feature for a decade, a gap during which his standing in the industry was extensively discussed. He returned with Hacksaw Ridge in 2016 and was nominated for Best Director at the 2017 Academy Awards. The photographs from 1987 show the most bankable leading man in American cinema. The recent ones show a director in his late sixties, still working.