The Bible according to Mel

Who remembers 9-to-5, starring Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin? In it, the three women gang up to take revenge against their boss, played by Dabney Coleman, who they labelled a 'sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot'. Which brings me, none-too-subtly, to the original Mad Max.

Mel Gibson, the one-time king of Hollywood (often incorrectly labelled as Australian, when in fact he was born in the US) has, in recent years, withdrawn from the silver screen. These days, he spends most of his time behind the camera, unless it's mounted in a police station for the sole purpose of taking mugshots.

He's been in the news lately, althought thankfully this time it wasn't for unleashing a torrent of anti-semitic bile at the police. He's been proudly announcing that his girlfriend, Russian singer Oksana Grigorieva, is pregnant with his eighth child. It's highly likely that this is the kind of 'irreconcilable difference' that his wife Robyn had in mind when she filed for divorce last month.

Now I'm not one to judge (much), but my issue here is with Mel's hypocrisy. In sharing his Aramaic-language slasher movie with the world (and pocketing an extraordinary amount of money in the process) he made a very public statement about his Catholic faith. So I'm curious as to how Mel reconciles his adultery with his religion. Or, for that matter, the fact that he recently settled a lawsuit with the writer of 'Passion of the Christ' who accepted a far lower salary than he would normally claim, based on Mel's substantial understatement of the film's budget. None of these things strike me as being particularly Christian qualities.

Since Robyn and Mel have been married for 28 years, she's apparently entitled to half of his £600 million fortune. The more I learn about Mel, the more I reckon that she's earned every penny.