Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mel Gibson played Max Rockatansky in the first three Mad Max films, released between 1979 and 1985. Tom Hardy took over the role in the 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road. Jacob Tomuri, who served as Tom Hardy's stunt double on Fury Road, appears as Max in a cameo in the 2024 prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Director George Miller, who trained as a doctor, chose the surname Rockatansky as an homage to Carl von Rokitansky, a pathologist who pioneered a method of examining organs at autopsies to determine the cause of death. This connection was noted by film critic Justin Chang.
In the first Mad Max film, a gang of bikers led by the Toecutter killed Max's infant son, referred to only as Sprog, and fatally injured his wife Jessie. This loss drove Max to resign from the Main Force Patrol and ultimately to hunt down and kill every gang member responsible.
Max is shot in the left leg and has his right arm run over in the first film. By the second film, he walks with a limp and wears a leg brace, which continues into the third film and reappears in Fury Road. An eye injury sustained in the crash of the Pursuit Special in the second film is still visible in the third.
Entertainment Weekly ranked Max Rockatansky eleventh on its list of the top twenty All-Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture in April 2009. Total Film placed him at number seventy-five in their Top 100 Movie Characters of All Time.
Max is most associated with the Pursuit Special, described in the films as the last of the V8 Interceptors. He drives this vehicle through the first two films before it is destroyed by Lord Humungus in Mad Max 2. He later acquires a roll-cage-equipped vehicle based on a pick-up truck, and in the 2015 video game he seeks to recover his V8 Interceptor from the warlord Scabrous Scrotus.