The notes of James Mee, the police officer who arrested Gibson on the suspicion of drunk driving, at first allegedly suppressed, were available on the internet last weekend. They did not have a heroic tale to tell. After addressing a female colleague of Mee's as "Sugar***s" and announcing that he owned Malibu (which he may very well do), Gibson launched into a pathetic and distasteful ramble against Jews. It was a suicide bombing on a golden career.

There is already a 'Mel Gibson Is My Designated Driver' tee shirt on the market. It was part of the media frenzy that followed his arrest, in which a sense of proportion was markedly absent.

Gibson did the Hollywood thing: he issued two grovelling apologies and vanished into rehab. Disney's ABC television wing cancelled a Holocaustthemed series that was to star Gibson.

The commentator, David Horowitz, was one of the few media types to keep his head. "People deserve compassion when they're in this kind of trouble, " he said of Gibson. "I think it would be very ungracious for people to deny it to him."

You don't hear that said about multimillionaire superstars very often. Even multi-millionaire superstars who have been drinking tequila.

Mel Gibson is a movie star with drink and drug problems and his downfall was predicted years ago, not by any of the psychologists he must have attended in his struggle with his demons, but by a film critic, David Thompson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Remembering Gibson's playing of Hamlet, and the seemingly endless Lethal Weapon films, Thompson wrote:

"Mel could end up rich and depressed.

He's better than cop capers, but he was woefully lost as the Dane."

They never say this about heterosexual heroes, but Gibson's career was built on his beauty. In France in the '80s and '90s, Arab men were heard to opine that they wished they looked like Mel Gibson, the acme of Caucasian good looks. Sean Connery, no less, suggested that Gibson would make an excellent James Bond. After training at a drama college in Sydney . . . with Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis . . . Gibson worked in film. He auditioned for his first film, Mad Max, with a face badly beaten from a drinking binge the night before. Mad Max was his best film, making the most of his ruggedness and his large-eyed desperation. From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump (through Gallipoli) to being a Hollywood heart-throb.

It was no surprise to anyone when Mel Gibson was voted Peoplemagazine's Sexiest Man Alive. But Braveheart, which won two Oscars, was a surprise, although it was a Brit-bashing extravaganza in which the worst thing you could say about an English king (in this case Edward II) was that he was homosexual. Gibson said that he wanted to recreate in Braveheart the films he had loved as a child, like Spartacus and Big Country.

His childhood, as the sixth of 10 children, was plainly visible in his next choice of project, The Passion Of The Christ. He had been named after St Mel (or the other St Mel, if you like), the first bishop of the Ardagh diocese in the early Irish church. Mel's father, Hutton, seems to have longed for those days of Christian certainty. He is a vigorous conspiracy theorist, a hater of Vatican II, a denier of the Holocaust, and to put it at its gentlest, a man of strong views. His muscular Catholicism did not include having his sons die for their country. At the time of the Vietnam draft, and allegedly after a win on the American gameshow Jeopardy! , he took his wife and eventual 11 children (one was adopted) out of America to Australia.

In 1980, Mel married Robyn Moore, who has borne him seven children. She is an Anglican who has refused to convert. Gibson has said that she is a much better Christian than he is, and certainly she seems tolerant. "She is my Rock of Gibraltar, " he has said. "Only prettier."

However Gibson has remained his father's son. The Passion Of The Christ was so conservative that, not only did it make $371m in the United States alone, but people started to talk about Gibson as a possible presidential nominee for the Republican party. His support for the death penalty and gun ownership certainly put him in that corner, as did his opposition to stem-cell research. In recent years, though, he has opposed the Iraq war. It was rumoured that his production company (which is behind the children's television series Savages, available on Nickolodeon) was going to fund Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore alleged that Gibson had been scared off the project, which was critical of President Bush, by conservative Republicans.

Increasingly Gibson turned to Catholicism, using his millions to build two churches, one in Malibu and one in West Virginia, where the Latin mass is said, and women must keep their heads covered. In matters of religion, Gibson is more conservative than any modern pope. (Although a Dublin visitor to the Malibu church said that it was very nice indeed, while sharing the unsurprising insight that Gibson is much smaller in real life).

God knows we have all got drunk and made fools of ourselves. However, few of us have become gods of the silver screen, whilst living with so much inner turmoil. Gibson has remained his father's son, even in middle-aged wealth. Through his struggles he has clung to particularly unattractive and, if we care to admit it, typically Irish, prejudices, which in the modern world just look sad. In 1995, he told a Spanish interviewer that he feared being thought homosexual because he was an actor. "Do I sound like a homosexual?

Do I talk like them? Do I move like them? I think not." This shows a fascination with male homosexuality that is usually only audible on the streets of Ireland after closing time. Mel Gibson refused to apologise and then worked on a gay filmmakers' training course by way of making amends.

In the Lethal Weapon series Gibson played a violent Vietnam vet with a death wish. Danny Glover was cast as his buddy, but increasingly seemed to be the troubled Gibson character's father. If only Danny Glover had been Mel Gibson's father perhaps we, and Mel Gibson, would have been spared a lot of grief.

C.V.

Name: Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson
Born: 3 January 1956, Peekskill, New York.
One of 11 children
Married: 1980, Robyn Moore. Seven children, six boys and one girl (one set of twins)
Profession: Actor
In the news because: He got drunk and made a fool of himself