(New York, NY)—On July 27, Oscar-winning actor and director, Mel Gibson was pulled over for drunken driving on a coastal highway in Malibu. A belligerent Gibson, (whose blood-alcohol level was found to be .12, 50 percent over

the legal limit) threatened L.A. County sheriff's deputy James Mee, and launched into a bizarre tirade spewing religious slurs. Shortly after, Gibson, who weathered charges of anti-Semitism after the release of his 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ, entered an alcohol treatment program and issued two apologies, admitting he was “deeply ashamed."

Though prominent members of the entertainment and Jewish communities have denounced Gibson’s remarks, friends of all faiths say he is a good man, loving father and devoted husband with a blind spot: an addiction to alcohol that, by his own admission, has brought him to the brink of suicide. Anchored by faith and family (he has seven children with Robyn, 50, his wife of 26 years), Gibson appeared to have reined in his drinking in recent years. But in recent weeks a different Gibson emerged. After a grueling nine-month shoot in Veracruz, Mexico, for his next film Apocalypto (an admittedly esoteric movie about a Mayan warrior hero with a Native American cast), Gibson told friends he had finally kicked cigarettes. "He was cleansing his body," a friend tells PEOPLE. However, Gibson was also drinking again and the more he drank, says the friend, the more self-destructive he became.

Gibson, who was the sixth of the 11 children of Hutton Gibson and Ann Reilly Gibson (who died in 1990), was raised in upstate New York until the age of 12. In 1968, he and the rest of his family moved to Australia where life was defined by an ultraconservative brand of Catholicism, so that the sons in the family could avoid the Vietnam draft. Gibson’s battle with alcohol dates back to his Australian youth and was also present in his early Hollywood career. A few long stints in rehab helped for a while, but Gibson has said his marriage and return to the Church got him to turn a corner. “His marriage is as strong as ever,” says a friend.

Since the success of The Passion of the Christ, Gibson has thrown himself into the filming of Apocalypto. While in Veracruz, "the weather was often pretty bad, oppressive and raining, so Mel would get upset a lot," says actor Mauricio Amuy, who spoke to PEOPLE. "He'd be screaming at the cast." Two actors contend that Gibson sometimes launched into long discussions of his religious beliefs. "He sometimes started talking about how the Jews were at fault for the killing of Jesus," says Amuy. "I got the feeling he didn't like Jews." (Alan Nierob, Gibson’s rep who is the son of Holocaust survivors, says that the actors misinterpreted Gibson and that Amuy was on-set for only three days.)

Gibson’s remarks come as a surprise to friends—many of them Jewish—in California, who describe him as a good man and a strict but devoted father who has raised seven decent children, and as an irrepressible on-set joker. "He was very excited about his [new] film," says longtime friend, Hollywood producer Dean Devlin, who saw Gibson the day of his arrest. "I recently had a baby, and he was going on about how great it is to have kids, how it changed his life." There was no sign Gibson had been drinking again. Says Devlin: "He must be going through hell."

If Gibson is convicted of DUI after leaving rehab, it's unlikely he'll get any jail time. "Malibu is not the toughest of courts," says Lawrence Taylor, an L.A. attorney who specializes in drunk-driving cases tells PEOPLE. "He'll probably get DUI school for a few months and be on probation for about three years. Legally, his alleged comments are irrelevant--a judge will likely not take that into consideration." The damage to his career may take far longer to repair. "I like that he apologized," Gibson’s old friend Tom Sherak tells PEOPLE. "And now he has to mean it." (Page 56-People Mag)