Mel Gibson to star as editor of the Oxford Dictionary

HE WAS a natural as Mad Max - dressed in black leather, with the desert sand blowing through his tousled hair. But how convincing will Mel Gibson be in 19th-century professorial garb, stooped over a 15,487- page academic manuscript?

Unlikely casting though it sounds, the butch Australian film star plans to take the role of the grey-bearded Dr James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, in a screen version of Simon Winchester's best-selling book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne.

Winchester's story is a quirky, historical account of the lexicographer's art, set largely in the libraries and panelled studies of Oxford. It chronicles the dedication and obsessive love of words which drove Dr Murray and his fellow contributors to pursue the gigantic dictionary project for 50 years.

Published in Britain last June, The Surgeon of Crowthorne sold in unexpectedly huge numbers on both sides of the Atlantic and soon became the subject of a ferocious Hollywood bidding war. The film rights eventually went to Luc Besson, the French director of Leon and The Fifth Element, for pounds 750,000.

Gibson is now so set upon the idea of playing Dr Murray that his production company, Icon, has entered into a co-production deal with Besson to bring the esoteric tale to the big screen as quickly as possible.

Once the film goes into production the former star of violent action film series such as Lethal Weapon and Mad Max will have to swap his customary motorbike for a rickety old tricycle. (Cinema audiences have, it should be remembered, already accepted Gibson in doublet and hose as Hamlet, while, a year earlier in 1989, Sean Connery passed himself off as an archaeologist in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.)

The original Dr Murray's chief talent appears to have been in handling the various boffins and monomaniacs who volunteered definitions and put together contextual examples of word usage for his dictionary. Crucially for Winchester, it was the life story of one of these dubious contributors, the deranged Dr WC Minor, that made it possible to tell the dictionary story along the lines of a thriller - ultimately attracting the attention of Hollywood to an otherwise dry subject.

Dr Minor was a wealthy American who trained as a doctor at Harvard before, in 1872, he inexplicably killed aman in London and was subsequently certified as criminally insane.

For 20 years he assiduously researched and contributed definitions for the New Oxford Dictionary from the scholarly seclusion of his cell at Broadmoor asylum.

In Oxford, Dr Murray was unaware of this fact during the long period of their correspondence. He believed Broadmoor to be the name of Dr Minor's country estate.

The two became firm friends, in spite of Dr Minor's recurrent bouts of madness. He was tormented by phantoms every night and eventually cut off his penis with a knife in an attempt to put an end to the torment of his sexual fantasies.

Robin Williams, star of Mrs Doubtfire and Flubber, is close to securing the Dr Minor role.