CINEMA: World's Only Living Toon

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That's just what Carrey was at school in Toronto. Exasperated, one teacher simply gave him 15 minutes to perform at the end of the school day. "I'd chew up a pack of heart-shaped powdered candies," he recalls, "then act like I was sick and throw up every color of the rainbow. For no reason, just that I could do it. " Jim had material for more scabrous satire: his alcoholic grandparents. "I'd imitate them, and the family would be crying from laughter. I'm, like, 10 years old, doing these alcoholics."

Jim's father gave up his vocation as a saxophonist for the ostensible security of being an accountant, but he lost that job, forcing the family, including Jim, then 13, to do factory work and live in a camper. "It made me realize," Carrey says, "that life offers no assurances, so you might as well do what you're really passionate about."

That meant pursuing his weird, wired muse at Toronto's and then Los Angeles' comedy clubs. "At first he would just mug and jump around," says Michael Becker, a pianist who occasionally worked with Carrey. "Then he began writing stuff down, shaping an act that was basically who he is today." Along the way, Carrey married a former comedy-club waitress (they are divorcing; he sees their six-year-old daughter three days a week). He now dates Picket Fences Lauren Holly, his costar in Dumb and Dumber.

After that movie comes Ace 2 and maybe Mask 2, but Carrey sees more in his life than sequels. He wants miracles. "When I was a kid, we couldn't afford a bicycle," he says. "So I prayed for one. A week later, I come home, and in the living room there's a Mustang bike I'd won in a raffle I didn't even enter. Life keeps doing that for me. If I wanted something, I asked for it -- and it's come to me."

Now, after a 15-year wait, Carrey is a star, complete with Brentwood home (two blocks from O.J.'s). But he is one Hollywood success for whom the trappings of fame don't seem to matter much. "I live in my head," he says. "I seriously do." The maintenance might be high there; the neighbors might complain about those strange noises. But for everyone else, Jim Carrey's head is a funny place to visit.