Haven’t seen a Comedian like Jim Carrey

Jim Carrey born as James Eugene Carrey is a Canadian-American actor, comedian, impressionist, screenwriter, and film producer. Known for his highly energetic slapstick performances, he has been described as one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood.

His Early Years

Jim Carrey was born on January 17, 1962 in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, to Kathleen (née Oram), a homemaker, and Percy Carrey (1927–1994), a musician and accountant. He has three older siblings: John, Patricia, and Rita. He was raised Roman Catholic. His mother was of French, Irish, and Scottish descent and his father was of French-Canadian ancestry (the family’s original surname was Carré).

During an interview with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio, Jim Carrey stated,

My father was a musician who got a “regular job” to support his children. When he lost his job that’s when everything fell apart. We went from “lower middle class” to “poor”. We were living out of a van. I quit school at age 15 to begin working to help support my family as a janitor. I’d have a baseball bat on my janitor cart because I was so angry I just wanted to beat the heck out of something.

After his family moved to Scarborough, Ontario he attended Blessed Trinity Catholic School, in North York, for two years, enrolled at Agincourt Collegiate Institute for another year, then briefly attended Northview Heights Secondary School. Jim Carrey never finished high school because he worked full-time to help his family survive their economic hardship, and also helped care for his mother who battled a severe, chronic illness.

Jim Carrey lived in Burlington, Ontario, for eight years, and attended Aldershot High School. In a Hamilton Spectator interview (February 2007), Carrey said,

If my career in show business hadn’t panned out I would probably be working today in Hamilton, Ontario at the Dofasco steel mill.

When looking across the Burlington Bay toward Hamilton, he could see the mills and thought, “Those were where the great jobs were.” At this point, he already had experience working in a science testing facility in Richmond Hill, Ontario.

HIS CAREER

The Genesis – While Jim Carrey was struggling to obtain work and make a name for himself, his father tried to help the young comedian put together a stage act, driving him to Toronto to debut at comedy club Yuk Yuk’s.

Jim Carrey’s impersonations bombed and this gave him doubts about his capabilities as a professional entertainer. His family’s financial struggles made it difficult for them to support Jim Carrey’s ambitions.

Eventually, the family’s financial problems were resolved and they moved into a new home. With more domestic stability, Carrey returned to the stage with a more polished act. In a short period of time, he went from open-mic nights to regular paid shows, building his reputation in the process. A reviewer in the Toronto Star raved that Carrey was “a genuine star coming to life”. Carrey was soon noticed by comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who signed the young comic to open his tour performances. Dangerfield eventually brought Carrey to Las Vegas. However, Carrey soon decided to move to Hollywood, where he began performing at The Comedy Store and, in 1982, appeared on the televised stand-up show An Evening at the Improv. The following year, he debuted his act on The Tonight Show.

Despite his increasing popularity as a stand-up comic, Carrey turned his attention to the film and television industries, auditioning to be a cast member for the 1980–1981 season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Carrey was not selected for the position, although he did host the show in May 1996, January 2011 and October 2014. He was cast in several low-budget films, including Rubberface (1983), in which he played a struggling young comic, and Copper Mountain (1983), in which he played a sex-starved teen. The latter film included his impersonation of Sammy Davis, Jr., and was not considered a full-length feature film since it ran less than one hour and consisted largely of musical performances by Rita Coolidge and Ronnie Hawkins.

In 1984, Jim Carrey was cast as the lead in the NBC sitcom The Duck Factory, where he played a quirky young artist alongside Jay Tarses. However, the show was cancelled during its first season. Despite the cancellation, the show helped Carrey land roles in several films. He played his first leading role in Once Bitten (1985) followed by supporting roles in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), The Dead Pool (1988), and Doing Time on Maple Drive (1992).

When Jim Carrey returned to stand-up, he retired his old act, vowing that he did not want to be famous for imitating other people.

Some nights it was a melee, literally, where I’d be standing trying to defend myself for what I was doing. People would be screaming at me to do my old act, and getting actually violent and angry at me.

While many thought he was ill-advised to retire his old act, others were increasingly interested in what Carrey was attempting to do. One of these people was writer/director Judd Apatow. The pair struck up a friendship and began writing material together.

Jim Carrey continued to land small roles in film and television productions in the late 1980s, which led to a friendship with fellow comedian Damon Wayans, who co-starred with Carrey as an extraterrestrial in 1989’s Earth Girls Are Easy. Damon introduced Carrey to his brother Keenen, who was creating a sketch comedy show called In Living Color for the new Fox network. Carrey eventually landed a recurring role in the show which first aired on April 15, 1990. By the third season, Jim Carrey was one of the few remaining original cast members and was ready to move on to bigger things, after agreeing to take on his first lead role in a major Hollywood film.

Rise to Fame – Jim Carrey did not experience true stardom until he was cast in the lead role of the slapstick comedy Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), which premiered only months before In Living Color ended. Though he agreed to play the title character, Carrey was willing to take the role only if he was allowed to rewrite the script to suit his over-the-top visions. The film, while dismissed by most critics, was an international hit, and transformed Carrey into a bankable box-office star.

That same year, Carrey landed lead roles in The Mask and Dumb and Dumber. The Mask garnered him his first Golden Globe Award for Best Actor nomination, with Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praising him for his “joyful performance”. Well received by critics, Dumb and Dumber was a commercial success, grossing over $270 million worldwide, and again increasing Carrey’s fanbase.

In 1995, Jim Carrey co-starred in the Joel Schumacher-directed superhero film Batman Forever, in which Batman tries to stop Two-Face and the Riddler (played by Carrey) in their villainous scheme to drain information from all the brains in Gotham City. The feature received reasonable reviews, with most criticism aimed at the movie’s “blatant commercialism”, as characterized by Peter Travers. In that same year, Carrey reprised his role as Ace Ventura in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Like the original film, it was well received by the public, but heavily criticised by critics. However, it was a huge box-office success, earning $212 million worldwide in addition to breaking records, with a $40 million opening weekend.

Jim Carrey earned $20 million for his next film, The Cable Guy (1996). Directed by Ben Stiller, Carrey played a lonely, slightly menacing cable TV installer who infiltrates the life of one of his customers (played by Matthew Broderick). The film tested Carrey’s boundaries of his tried and true “hapless, hyper, overconfident” characters that he is known for regularly playing. However, it did not fare well with critics, many reacting towards Carrey’s change of tone to previous films. Despite the reviews, The Cable Guy grossed $102 million worldwide.

In 2007, Carrey reunited with Joel Schumacher, director of Batman Forever, for The Number 23, a psychological thriller co-starring Virginia Madsen and Danny Huston. In the film, Carrey plays a man who becomes obsessed with the number 23, after finding a book about a man with the same obsession. The film was panned by critics and did not fare well at the box office. The following year Carrey provided his voice for Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (2008). Carrey voiced the beloved elephant for the CGI-animated feature, which received overwhelmingly positive reviews and delivered family crowds en masse. The film was also a box office success, raking in over $290 million worldwide.

For the first time in his career, Carrey portrayed multiple characters in Disney’s 3D animated take on the classic Charles Dickens tale, A Christmas Carol (2009), voicing Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the film also starred Robin Wright Penn, Bob Hoskins, Colin Firth, Gary Oldman, and Cary Elwes. The film received reasonable reviews and was a financial success. In 2011, Carrey landed the lead role in Mr. Popper’s Penguins, playing Thomas “Tom” Popper Jr. a realtor who becomes the caretaker of a family of penguins. The film received a mixed reception upon release.

In 2013, he starred alongside former co-star Steve Carell in the Don Scardino-directed comedy film Burt Wonderstone (2013). Carrey played Steve Gray, a dangerous street magician who overshadows the formerly successful magician Burt Wonderstone (played by Carell). The film was released in March 2013 to mixed reviews and underperformed significantly at the box office, grossing just over $27 million on a $30 million budget.

Peter Farrelly said in April 2012 that Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels would return for a Dumb and Dumber sequel, Dumb and Dumber To, with the Farrelly brothers writing and directing and a planned September 2012 production start. In June, however, Carrey’s representative said Jim Carrey had left the project because the comedian felt New Line and Warner Bros. were unenthusiastic toward it. However, on October 1, 2012, Yahoo!’s “The Yo Show” carried the news item that the script was complete and that the original actors, Carrey and Daniels, would be reprising their roles. The plot involved one of the characters having sired a child and needing to find them in order to obtain a kidney. Dumb and Dumber To was released in November 2014.

In March 2013, Carrey announced that he had written a children’s book titled How Roland Rolls, about a scared wave named Roland. He described it as “kind of a metaphysical children’s story, which deals with a lot of heavy stuff in a really childish way.” Carrey self-published the book, which was released in September 2013.

Carrey delivered the commencement address at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, in May 2014 and received an honorary doctorate for his achievements as a comedian, artist, author, and philanthropist.

HIS PERSONAL LIFE

Jim Carrey has battled depression. To deal with his depression, Carrey took Prozac, eventually deciding to get off medications. He has stated that he no longer takes medications or stimulants of any kind, not even coffee.

Carrey has been a critic of the scientific consensus that no evidence links the childhood MMR vaccination to the development of autism, and wrote an article questioning the merits of vaccination and vaccine research for the Huffington Post. With former partner Jenny McCarthy, Carrey led a “Green Our Vaccines” march in Washington, D.C., to advocate for the removal of toxins from children’s vaccines, out of a belief that children had received “too many vaccines, too soon, many of which are toxic.”

Jim Carrey is a follower and an advocate for the law of attraction. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1997, Carrey revealed that as a struggling actor he would use visualization techniques to get work. He also stated that he visualized a $10,000,000 check given to him for “Acting services rendered”, placed the check in his pocket, and seven years later received a check for $10,000,000 for his role in Dumb and Dumber.

Carrey is a Transcendental Meditation practitioner.

In 1983 Carrey dated Linda Ronstadt for 8 months. Carrey has been married twice. His first marriage was to former actress and Comedy Store waitress Melissa Womer, whom he married on March 28, 1987. Their daughter Jane Erin Carrey was born September 6, 1987. Jane was a 2012 contestant on American Idol. The two divorced in 1995.

A year later Carrey married his Dumb and Dumber co-star Lauren Holly, on September 23, 1996; the marriage lasted less than a year. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Carrey was involved in a series of relationships, including Laurie Holden, January Jones, and Anine Bing. In addition, Carrey had a much-publicized yet short-lived romance with his Me, Myself and Irene co-star Renée Zellweger, whom he dated, and at one point was engaged to from 1999 to 2000.

Carrey met model and actress Jenny McCarthy in 2005 and made their relationship public in June 2006. In April 2010, the two ended their near five-year relationship. Despite the split and media circulations, McCarthy stated in October 2010 that,

Jim and I are still good friends.

Jim Carrey received U.S. citizenship in October 2004 and remains a dual citizen of both the United States and his native Canada.

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