FOREMOST among the more improbable success stories in the history of Hollywood is the meteoric rise to fame of actor Jim Carrey, who transformed himself from B-grade wannabe to A-list leading man in the span of just one remarkable year. With only the spottiest of cinematic oeuvres and national name recognition equivalent to that of your average North Dakota congressperson, Carrey descended on the box office like a ton of bricks in February 1994 as the title character of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, a low-rent Miami snoop whose butt-soliloquizing shenanigans busted pre-adolescent guts to the unanticipated tune of $72 million. As the limber-limbed actor himself later put it, "Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass." And how. By the end of the year, Carrey had logged two more smash hits, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, each of which easily exceeded the $100 million mark in domestic grosses. His mind-blowing breakthrough was confirmed in 1995 when Sony coughed up $20 million — at the time the largest straight sum ever paid any actor for one movie — to secure his services for The Cable Guy.
By most accounts (including his own), Carrey was exactly the sort of youth you'd imagine:
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a rambunctious and fearlessly extroverted child with a wildly active imagination. When he was 10, he sent a résumé to The Carol Burnett Show. The youngest of four siblings, Carrey was born and raised in the suburbs of Toronto. As a youngster he developed his sense of humor by pulling faces in front of the mirror and by doing impersonations of his alcoholic grandparents; he made his stage debut in the role of Santa Claus in a third grade Christmas pageant at the Blessed Trinity School. Later on, he did standup comedy for his schoolmates, most notably in the seventh grade, when his teacher induced her irrepressibly comic pupil to behave by allowing him to do impromptu 15-minute routines for the class at the end of each day.
...read more at Mr.Showbiz
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