Though introduced to American audiences as Australian, the strikingly handsome, blue-eyed Mel Gibson actually hailed from Peekskill, New York. (He and his family had emigrated Down Under in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War.) After a season onstage with Sydney's South Australian Theatre Company where he portrayed both Oedipus and Henry IV, he made his name as the leather-clad, post-apocalyptic action hero of George Miller's "Mad Max" and in the radically different "Tim" (both 1979), for which he picked up his first of two Australian Film Institute Awards as Best Actor, playing a retarded