Mel and his "mid-life crisis"

Which is why Signs is shaping up to be the biggest film of his career. It's a huge hit in the US and has put Gibson right back on top of the A-list, just when it looked as if younger, groovier stars, such as Vin Diesel, would muscle him out of the way.

Gibson plays a tortured father struggling to raise his children after the tragic loss of his wife. As in most Gibson films of late, he suffers a crisis of faith and confidence, only to rediscover same and embrace redemption. Gibson jumped at the role - and plays it fearlessly - because it is only a thinly veiled incarnation of himself. In Signs he is an Episcopalian priest who has turned his back on the Church.

In real life, Gibson admits he shut out the Catholic Church between the ages of 17 and 35. It was, he says, "18 years of wandering in the wasteland".

That wandering ended when he met his wife of 22 years, Robyn, and it's a marriage that's considered one of the strongest in Hollywood. They met in Adelaide in 1977 when Gibson, then a stage actor, became her flatmate in a shared apartment.

He married Robyn, a former dental nurse, when they were both 24 in a quick and private ceremony, amid rumours that they were expecting a baby, despite Gibson's devout Catholic belief in no sex before marriage.

Robyn's shy but down-to-earth manner has been a steadying influence on Gibson, who claims she saved him from self-destruction and kept their family together.

The drinking binges that nearly destroyed his career, and led to an arrest for drink-driving in 1984, started after Gibson found that the loss of privacy and pressure of fame he encountered after the success of such films as Mad Max became too much to handle. It took Robyn's threat that she would leave him unless he stopped drinking to make him join Alcoholics Anonymous in 1991 and clean up his act.

Gibson still comes across as the tortured family man who appears - as in Signs - to do unrelenting battle with his own faith. He always seems fidgety and on edge, whether smoking or not (he is forever quitting). When he's smoking, he does so almost frenetically, sucking on each cigarette down to the filter. But today he has quit again, so fiddles with his water glass, his hair and clothes. He persists in affecting the jokey bloke persona, but it doesn't quite ring true the older he gets. "I hate my kids," he says, when asked if he prefers to play fathers. We know, of course, that he doesn't.

He has the archetypally large Catholic family (seven children ranging from three to "twentysomething" - his only daughter being Hannah) and grew up in another (the sixth of 11 children). His flock boasts solid Christian names (no Romeo, only a Milo among them) and anonymous lives. They are not photographed with their father, as much at their insistence as his, it seems. He reportedly once showed up for the afternoon school run in a limo, was roundly berated for it and remains convinced his fame has been a burden to them. "I think there's no getting around it. It's a factor in who they are and how the world treats them.

"I do try and keep them sheltered and protected from the business and cross my fingers and hope that they don't do anything too stupid. It's just about making sure they get through school and if they do something stupid, telling them. Teenagers are no fun, let me tell you. I had four at once.

"There were dreary days of lectures and earbashings. I'd think, 'God, I did this. If only they'd just listen to me they'd be fine.'" There are more teenagers in the pipeline but, from what he says, his children do seem fine.

"Hannah is adventuresome. She's got a life, you know. She's travelled around the world already, she and some friends, and that's really good. She looks good. She's healthy, she's smart. There is no cause to make me worried, so that's a relief." He says he's got better at parenting, having had the benefit of hindsight.

"The younger kids are really reaping the benefit of the learning time we spent on the older ones. You get more adept as time goes by but my wife is more of a disciplinarian than I am."

But just as he beams in obvious pride at watching his flock leave home, he admits that he's losing a psychological and emotional crutch in his domestic life, a place where he has long sought refuge from his fame and public adulation. No wonder he's a prime candidate for a mid-life crisis.

Fortunately, there are no lurid Harrison Ford-style tales of romantic shenanigans, though Gibson isn't afraid to admit that his marriage hasn't always been perfect. "The whole relationship thing is tough, any time. I've been married for 22 years and people don't go that far these days. It doesn't happen.

"You're going to get ups and downs and you're going to get days when you really want to strangle each other. That is just going to happen. It doesn't matter who the other person is. You can think, 'Well, if I find someone else', but that's bullshit. You're going to go through the same old shit with anybody. You just have to adapt and give and take and receive and give. So you might as well stay where you're at and figure it out.

"Every time that happens and you go through a dry spell - and in 22 years that happens a lot - when you come out the other side you're just so much better at it. It's just experience. People throw in the towel on relationships far too early."

A pointed warning to all his contemporary macho stars, desperately clinging on to a faded youth. At least Gibson seems grown-up enough to admit it.