jane carrey

The youngest of four children born to Percy (an accountant and aspiring jazz saxophonist) and Kathleen, Jim Carrey was an incurable extrovert from day one. As a child he performed constantly, for anyone who would watch, and even mailed his résumé to "The Carol Burnett Show" (1967) at age 10. In junior high he was granted a few precious minutes at the end of each school day to do stand-up routines for his classmates (provided, of course, that he kept a lid on it the rest of the day). Carrey's early adolescence took a turn for the tragic, however, when the family was forced to relocate from their cozy town of Newmarket to Scarborough (a Toronto suburb). They all took security and janitorial jobs in the Titan Wheels factory, Jim working 8-hour shifts after school let out (not surprisingly, his grades and morale both suffered). When they finally deserted the factory, the family lived out of a Volkswagen camper van until they could return to Toronto. Back on firmer ground, Carrey decided to strike out into the comedy club scene. He made his (reportedly awful) professional stand-up debut at Yuk-Yuk's, one of the many local clubs that would serve as his training ground in the years to come. He dropped out of high school, worked on his celebrity impersonations (among them Michael Landon and James Stewart), and in 1979 worked up the nerve to move to Los Angeles. He finessed his way into a regular gig at The Comedy Store, where he impressed Rodney Dangerfield so much that the veteran comic signed him as an opening act for an entire season. During this period Carrey met and married waitress Melissa Womer, with whom he had a daughter (Jane). The couple would later go through a very messy divorce, freeing Carrey up for a brief second marriage to actress Lauren Holly. Wary of falling into the lounge act lifestyle, Carrey began to look around for other performance outlets. He landed a part as a novice cartoonist in the short-lived sitcom "The Duck Factory" (1984); while the show fell flat, the experience gave Carrey the confidence to pursue acting more vigorously. He scored the male lead in the ill-received Lauren Hutton vehicle Once Bitten (1985), and a supporting role in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), before making a modest splash with his appearance as the alien Wiploc in Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). Impressed with Carrey's lunacy, fellow extraterrestrial Damon Wayans made a call to his brother, Keenen Ivory Wayans, who was in the process of putting together the sketch comedy show "In Living Color" (1990). Carrey joined the cast and quickly made a name for himself with outrageous acts (one of his most popular characters, psychotic Fire Marshall Bill, was attacked by watchdog groups for dispensing ill- advised safety tips). Carrey's transformation from TV goofball to marquee headliner happened within the course of a single year. He opened 1994 with a starring turn in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), a film that cashed in on his extremely physical brand of humor (the character's trademark was talking out his derrière). Next up was the manic superhero movie The Mask (1994), which had audiences wondering just how far Carrey's features could stretch. Finally, in December, he hit theaters as a loveable dolt in the Farrelly brothers' Dumb & Dumber (1994) (his first multi-million dollar payday). Now a box-office staple, Carrey brought his manic antics onto the set of Batman Forever (1995), replacing Robin Williams as The Riddler. He also filmed the follow-up to his breakthrough, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995), and inked a deal with Sony to star in The Cable Guy (1996) (replacing Chris Farley) for a cool $20 million--at the time, that was the biggest up-front sum that had been offered to any comic actor. The movie turned out to be a disappointment, both critically and financially, but Carrey bounced back the next year with the energetic hit Liar Liar (1997). Worried that his comic shtick would soon wear thin, Carrey decided to change course. In 1998, he traded in the megabucks and silly grins to star in Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998). Playing a naive salesman who discovers that his entire life is the subject of a TV show, Carrey demonstrated an uncharacteristic sincerity that took moviegoers by surprise. He won a Golden Globe for the performance, and fans anticipated an Oscar nomination as well--when it didn't materialize, Carrey lashed out at Academy members for their narrow-minded selection process. Perhaps inspired by the snub, Carrey threw himself into his next role with abandon. After edging out a handful of other hopefuls (including Edward Norton) to play eccentric funnyman Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon (1999), Carrey disappeared into the role, living as Kaufman -- and his blustery alter-ego Tony Clifton -- for months (Carrey even owned Kaufman's bongo drums, which he'd used during his audition for director Milos Forman). His sometimes uncanny impersonation was rewarded with another Golden Globe, but once again the Academy kept quiet. An indignant Carrey next reprised his bankable mania for the Farrelly brothers in Me, Myself & Irene (2000), playing a state trooper whose Jekyll and Hyde personalities both fall in love with the same woman (Renée Zellweger). Carrey's real-life persona wound up falling for her too--a few months after the film wrapped, the pair announced they were officially a couple. By then, Carrey had already slipped into a furry green suit to play the stingy antihero of Ron Howard's How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000). He plans to take a break from the limelight after the holiday flick (as he puts it, "I'm looking forward to getting out of America's face"). Is there another Carrey reinvention in the works? If so, he's not talking.

Haven't we met before? You look familiar." Jim Carrey is smiling and offering his hand. He pauses for a half-second while you wonder whether you've somehow forgotten meeting the actor who raised the big-star salary bar to $20 million per picture, then says, "Must have been on 'America's Most Wanted'." It's an unashamedly lame joke, the sort of teasing jab that precedes a lot of chortling and backslapping in countless corner taverns. And, indeed, although Carrey is famous for his epic face-pulling, a head full of lunatic voices and a preternatural drive to do anything for a laugh, you get the idea his default comic setting is closer to that of a chronically wisecracking uncle.

Chronic, but not constant. When Carrey's not trolling for laughs, he's so earnestly tapping into his emotional life ("I'm in a very grateful place," he says) that sometimes you long for Ace Ventura to pop up and throttle him. But another, unfamiliar side is revealed when he talks now: the grown-up Jim Carrey.

Carrey doesn't speak to the press very often, particularly not in the past few years, after his 2001 Hollywood blacklisting movie "The Majestic" got blacklisted by moviegoers and the media began taking more interest in his private life than in his career (the latest tidbit being his ex-wife's demand to increase the $10,000 a month in child support Carrey had paid for their 15-year-old daughter, Jane). It's not because he hates doing interviews. Rather, it's because he likes them too much. As Carrey himself once observed, he tends to turns them into therapy sessions. To wit: "I used to spend a lot of time in interviews being really angry at my parents," he says.

This particular Carrey confessional took place in a spacious private room at the Fiamma Osteria, a sleek Soho restaurant in New York. He chose the site because it was familiar: He'd recently spent several long days there rehearsing with Kate Winslet for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", a low-budget, dark romantic comedy due out in November. That quirky project, from the off-kilter mind of "Adaptation" screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, is a long way from the ostensible reason for this interview: for Carrey to promote his newest movie, "Bruce Almighty", the comedy that opens this weekend. The problem is that we spend so much time talking about everything except "Bruce" that Carrey guiltily calls the next day -- in a universe ruled by publicists, unsolicited calls from major stars to reporters' homes are almost unthinkable -- to make sure he's on the record raving about co-star Jennifer Aniston ("totally cool") and everyone else he worked with.

"It's really fun when you find someone who has good chemistry and it's a pleasure to go to work," he says of Aniston, adding, without naming names, "and you don't have to deal with a monster."

Carrey is that rare well-known actor who's taller in person than expected: He's comfortably over 6 feet. He's decked out in a blue T-shirt with a karate-kicker logo, jeans, a mop of brown hair under a stocking cap and a few days' growth of beard. With that look, plus his skinny frame, the 41-year-old easily could pass for a 30-year-old alt-rocker, if it weren't for the crow's-feet that break out when he smiles. But looks can be deceiving. "I'm not the wild man I once was," Carrey says.

Turning 40 has a way of doing that. So does being the father of a teenager. Carrey talks adoringly about daughter Jane. "One thing that I've matured in is that I've realized how good it is that she's such a sharp human being," he says. "We have a blast together. That, to me, will be the thing that counts." (Winslet, his "Sunshine" co-star, says: "It's interesting to sit with them when they're in that father-daughter state. It's like, Jim Carrey -- after all those things, $20 million-dollar man, whatever -- is a regular dad who really cares about his kid.") Jane is from Carrey's first marriage, to actress Melissa Womer, which ended after six years in 1993. There was also a mid-'90s roller-coaster relationship with his "Dumb and Dumber" co-star Lauren Holly, which included less than a year of marriage, followed by a romance with Renée Zellweger, his co-star in the 2000 comedy "Me, Myself & Irene", and plenty of tomcatting. On a practical level, turning into an adult has required Carrey to adjust his attitude toward women. He used to think that "it was OK to sleep with someone and never call them again," he says. "But I can't live like that anymore."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Carrey says Jennifer Aniston, his "Bruce Almighty" girlfriend, is "totally cool."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In a more general way, Carrey has achieved some sort of peace with the torments that so often are the flip side of the manic need to entertain that drives so many comedians. "The highs are not so high, and the lows are not so low," says Tom Shadyac, who directed his pal Carrey in "Bruce Almighty" as well as "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Liar Liar". "There's an evenness to Jim's life now."

Part of the mellowing -- still a relative term for this kinetic star -- applies to his attitude about his past. Carrey's father, an accountant who died in 1994, and his often-ailing mother, who died in 1991, came to rely on his earnings when Carrey launched a career as a teenage stand-up comedian in Toronto when his dad was unemployed. As an adult looking back on a childhood spent, in part, as the breadwinner for a family of six, Carrey resented his parents' "putting so much responsibility on me so early." Now, he says, "The way I look at it is, 'This much they did wrong, and this much they did right' " -- specifically, their support for his comedy dreams. "They always told me I was funny, not stupid."

Carrey's adolescence was not so much stolen as deferred: What are the "Ace Ventura" movies, "The Mask" and "Dumb and Dumber" if not a teenager's multimillion-dollar daydreams? But just as Carrey the performer has started maturing in recent years with serious fare such as "The Truman Show" and "The Majestic" and comedies with a semblance of a message ("Liar Liar": "Parents, don't B.S. your kids"), so has Carrey grown up personally. "I've done enough thinking for five lifetimes," he says. "I want to work and lay some things down that mean something to me."

Carrey's slate of upcoming roles -- including the scheming Count Olaf in a movie version of the "Series of Unfortunate Events" children's books and, tentatively, Howard Hughes in a biopic -- might mean something to him but risks further clouding precisely what Jim Carrey means to movie audiences. "People" magazine movie critic Leah Rozen says the actor "is to be applauded" for venturing beyond the slapstick that made him famous, but, she cautions, "There's no fixed persona for him, and I think that makes it somewhat difficult for a long-term career as a big, iconic movie star." Carrey says his agenda is simply "to make sure people never get bored with me."

Hollywood kibitzers like to speculate that Carrey casts such a wide net in an endless quest for his first Academy Award. But he shrugs off the supposed Oscar obsession and calls acting a "ridiculous way of making a living." For this star, coveting an Oscar would be like "being a hog at a banquet." Actually winning one? "If it happens, great."

Carrey may have been late in arriving at such a grown-up approach to life, but these days the comedian seems to have it aced.

Mark Lasswell is a freelance writer who lives in New York. Carrey gravitates toward the beach on weekends, but until last year he hadn't actually bought an oceanside home. He rented beach houses regularly and even darted to Hawaii several times for weekend R&R. ("You get off the plane and the warm wind takes your troubles into the ocean. It's beautiful.") Then last fall Carrey decided, "Why waste all this money renting?" -- and reportedly dropped about $9.5 million for a place on the water in Malibu. He acts a little sheepish about maintaining such a lavish getaway ("I know it sounds sick, really ill") and insists the place doubles as a vacation home for his extended family.

When he's in residence, a typical weekend includes reading three scripts and running 8 miles a day, on the beach, in Malibu proper or at home on a treadmill that faces the Pacific. "I love the ocean," Carrey says. "I love being near the source of life. I imagine myself crawling out of the surf with fins." It sounds like sappy Malibuspeak, except that when Jim Carrey says it, he instantly turns his hands into flippers coming out of his rib cage, makes a face like a fledgling amphibian and nearly flops across the table in pursuit of a laugh.
-- M.L.

Photography by George Lange for USA WEEKEND
Styling by Alyssa Dineen. Grooming by Cohl Katz. Wall by Miranda Lloyd.
Clothing: Cover -- Shirt by J. Lindeberg, jacket by New York Industrie, pants by Banana Republic. Above -- Shirt by Etro, pants by Banana Republic, shoes by Marc Jacobs.


Actress Jenny McCarthy, 34, was spotted out on a shopping trip with beau Jim Carrey's, 45, daughter Jane, 19. They started at the Chip & Pepper warehouse where they purchased matching University of Maryland sweatshirts. TMZ cameras caught them wearing these and the video can be watched at their website. Jane is not the blonde girl in the beginning, behind Jenny, who's actually her sister Amy, but the dark-haired girl at the very end when they're all getting into the car. Jane is Carrey's only child; Jenny has son Evan, 4, with ex-husband John Asher, 36.

Source: TMZ

Thanks to CBB reader Mary Beth.




Posted on Jan 17, 07 at 03:00 PM in Celeb babies, in their own right, Video | Link | Comments (2) | | Email this post


Your Comments
Aww, Maryland love! Does his daughter go there, or was that just random?

Posted by: Jessie at Jan 17, 2007 8:33:50 PM


Jane has grown into such a beautiful lady, not that I could see her well in those pix :-b
I'm a massive Jim Carrey fan and remember the 1st time I saw Janes photo. It was when Jim was putting his handprints outside Grumans theatre. Jane was a really cute chubby kid :-)

Posted by: Heavenly_hibiscus at Jan 18, 2007 1:05:02 AM



Post a comment
Are you aware of our comment policy?

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the site staff has approved them. Please do not post nasty comments- either towards celebrities, readers or the staff of the Celebrity Baby Blog. Any comments that include the following will be deleted and the commenter will be banned from posting further comments: spam, advertising, inflammatory remarks (intentional or otherwise), anything that insults the owner or staff of the site, anything that insults readers of the site., or anyone else, for that matter. Feel free to agree or disagree with each other as long as you do it respectfully.
Jim Carrey was born in Newmarket, Ontario to Kathleen Oram, and Percy Carrey, a mortician.[1][2] He has three older siblings, John, Patricia and Rita. The family was Catholic[3] and has some French Canadian ancestry (as the original surname was Carré).[4]

After the family moved to Scarborough when Carrey was 14, he attended Blessed Trinity Catholic School in North York for two years, before enrolling at Agincourt Collegiate Institute, Scarborough's oldest high school.

Carrey lived in Burlington, Ontario for eight years and attended Aldershot High School. In a Hamilton Spectator interview (February 2007), Carrey remarks that "if his career in show business hadn't panned out he would probably be working today in the Circus industry or dealing crack in the streets of Ontario." When looking across the Burlington Bay towards Hamilton he could see the mills and thought "those were where the great jobs were." He already had experience working in a science testing facility Richmond Hill, Ontario and was somewhat resigned to that career path.[5]

In 1990, Carrey's breakthrough came when he landed a starring comedic role on the hit television show In Living Color.


Start in comedy
In 1979, under the management of Leatrice Spevack, Carrey started doing stand-up comedy at Yuk Yuk's in Toronto, where he rose to become a headliner in February 1981, shortly after his 19th birthday. One reviewer in the Toronto Star raved that Carrey was "a genuine star coming to life."[6] In the early 1980s, Carrey moved to Los Angeles and started working at The Comedy Store, where he was noticed by comedian Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield liked Carrey's performance so much that he signed Carrey to open Dangerfield's tour performances.[citation needed]

Carrey then turned his attention to the film and television industries, auditioning to be a castmember for 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). His first lead role on television was Skip Tarkenton, a young animation producer on NBC's short-lived The Duck Factory, airing from April 12, 1984 to July 11, 1984, and offering a behind-the-scenes look at the crew that produced a children's cartoon.[7]

Carrey continued working in smaller film and television roles, which led to a friendship with fellow comedian Damon Wayans, who co-starred with Carrey as a fellow extraterrestrial in 1989's Earth Girls are Easy. When Wayans' brother Keenen began developing a sketch comedy show for Fox called In Living Color, Carrey was hired as a castmember, whose unusual characters included masochistic safety inspector Fire Marshall Bill (whose dangerous "safety tips" were the target of censors and watchdog groups who saw the character as a dangerous example for naive younger viewers [citation needed]), and masculine female bodybuilder Vera de Milo. His onscreen antics caught the eye of Hollywood in a big way.


Film career
Carrey made his film debut in Rubberface (1983) (in a minor role), which was known as 'Introducing...Janet' at the time of release. Later that year, he won the leading role in Damian Lee's Canadian skiing comedy Copper Mountain, which included his amusing impersonation of Sammy Davis Jr.. Since the film had a less than one hour runtime consisting largely of musical performances by Rita Coolidge and Rompin' Ronnie Hawkins, it was not considered a genuine feature film. A few years later, Carrey saw his first major starring role in the dark comedy Once Bitten in the role of Mark Kendall, a teen virgin pursued by a 400-year old female vampire (played by Lauren Hutton). After supporting roles in films such as Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Earth Girls are Easy (1988) and The Dead Pool (1988) Carrey did not experience true stardom until being cast to star in the 1994 comedy Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which premiered only months before In Living Color ended its run. The film was panned by critics, and earned Carrey a 1995 Golden Raspberry Award nomination as Worst New Star.[8]

However, the film was a huge commercial success, as were his two other starring roles, in The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, both released the same year.

In 1995, Carrey appeared as the Riddler in Batman Forever and reprised his role as Ace Ventura in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Both films were successful at the box office and earned Carrey multi-million-dollar paychecks.

Carrey made headlines when it was revealed that he earned twenty million dollars for his next film, The Cable Guy (directed by Ben Stiller), a record sum for a comedy actor. The attention drawn to the paycheck, coupled with some negative reviews, and the film's dark sensibility, all contributed to the film's mediocre earnings, although the film is regarded as sadly underrated by a significant number of people [citation needed]. Carrey quickly rebounded with the successful (and lighter) Liar Liar, a return to his trademark comedy style.

Carrey took a chance to play a more serious role (and a slight paycut) to star in The Truman Show (1998), a change of pace that led to forecasts of Academy Award nominations. Although the movie was nominated for three other awards, Carrey did not personally receive a nomination, leading him to joke that "it's an honor just to be nominated...oh no," during his appearance on the Oscar telecast. However, Carrey did win a Golden Globe (for Best Actor in a Drama) and an MTV Movie Award (for Best Male Performance). That same year, Carrey appeared as a fictionalized version of himself on the final episode of Garry Shandling's The Larry Sanders Show, making an impression by ripping deliberately into Shandling's character.

In 1999, Carrey won the role of comedian Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon. Several actors, including Edward Norton, were interested in the role, but Carrey's audition, including an act with the bongo drums Kaufman used in his performances, helped him to be cast[citation needed]. (Coincidentally, Carrey was born thirteen years to the day after Kaufman). Despite critical acclaim, he was not nominated for an Academy Award, but again won a Best Actor Golden Globe award for the second consecutive year.

In 2000, Carrey reteamed with the Farrelly Brothers (who had directed him in Dumb and Dumber) in their comedy, Me, Myself & Irene, about a state trooper with multiple personalities who romances a woman played by Renée Zellweger. The film grossed $24 million dollars on its opening weekend and $90 million by the end of its domestic run. Carrey has since continued to appear in successful comedies in addition to more dramatic roles. His performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) earned high praise from critics, who again incorrectly predicted that Carrey would receive an Oscar nomination, although the film did win for Best Original Screenplay, and co-star Kate Winslet received a nomination for her performance. (Carrey was also nominated for a sixth Golden Globe for this performance).

In 2003, Carrey reteamed with Tom Shadyac for the financially successful comedy Bruce Almighty. Earning over $242 million in the U.S. and over $484 million worldwide, this film became the second highest grossing live-action comedy of all time.

In 2004, he played Count Olaf in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which was based on the popular children's novels. In 2005, Carrey starred in a remake of Fun with Dick and Jane, playing Dick, a husband who loses his job after his company goes bankrupt.

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 an obscure book he believes is somehow based on his life.

Carrey has stated that he finds the prospect of reprising a character to be considerably less enticing than taking on a new role.[9]


Personal life
Carrey has been married twice, first to former actress and Comedy Store waitress Melissa Womer, with whom he has a daughter, Jane Erin Carrey (b. September 1987). They were married on March 28, 1987 and were officially divorced in late 1995. After his separation from Womer in 1994, Carrey began dating his Dumb and Dumber co-star Lauren Holly. They were married on September 23, 1996; the marriage lasted less than a year. Carrey dated actress Renée Zellweger, whom he met on the set of Me, Myself & Irene, but their relationship ended in a broken engagement in December 2000. During 2004, Jim dated his massage therapist Tiffany O. Silver. In December 2005, Carrey began dating actress/model Jenny McCarthy. The pair have since denied engagement rumors.[10] In the May 2006 issue of Playboy Magazine (pg 48), it was mentioned that he has dated model Anine Bing.

Carrey supports the West London football club Brentford FC after visiting a Hollywood cafe owned by a Brentford supporter. [citation needed]

He attended a Presbyterian Church with his family in the early 1990s.[11] Carrey really does have a chipped tooth; for his role in Dumb and Dumber, he simply removed the tooth cap.[12] He owns a Gulfstream Aerospace Gulfstream V and also drives a Saleen S7 (the car his Bruce Almighty character received using godlike powers was his own). Carrey is a big fan of the death metal band Cannibal Corpse[13], who did a cameo in Ace Ventura. He is a huge fan of professional wrestling and the cartoons Johnny Bravo, Spongebob Squarepants and Dave the Barbarian [citation needed]

Carrey received U.S. citizenship on October 7, 2004 and now maintains dual citizenship between the U.S. and his native Canada, where he has a star on Canada's Walk of Fame[14] in Toronto since 1998. He went public about his bouts with depression in a November 2004 interview on 60 Minutes.[15]