The 1969 movie that changed Jim Carrey’s life forever: “I’ll never forget that day”
While he enjoyed one of the most impressive breakout years in Hollywood history by contorting his endlessly malleable face, gurning, and pratfalling like there was no tomorrow, not all of Jim Carrey’s inspirations had a comedic background.
Within the space of ten months, he’d taken top billing in his first, second, and third movies, with the common thread being that Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber were all huge hits. At the start of 1994, he was the white guy from In Living Color, but by the end of it, he was an A-lister.
It’s no surprise that Carrey has repeatedly named Peter Sellers as one of his heroes, because there’s hardly a comedy actor in the business with a fondness for dousing themselves in makeup and prosthetics who hasn’t, with Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers just two of the others who made a name for themselves disappearing into unrecognisable characters who hold him on the highest pedestal.
Jerry Lewis was the single biggest influence, though, with Carrey feeling from a young age that he and the legendary stand-up, actor, singer, musician, and filmmaker had an unspoken connection that bordered on the psychic. So far, so expected, but not all of his idols made their name by splitting audiences at the side.
It didn’t really become evident until The Truman Show, but after seeing the star’s Golden Globe-winning performance, one that was egregiously snubbed by the Academy Awards, it made perfect sense that James Stewart was another one of the most important filmic figures in Carrey’s life, with that affable everyman quality serving him incredibly well in Peter Weir’s modern classic.
You wouldn’t necessarily include Kurt Russell among that number, mostly because he and Carrey have never crossed paths in a professional capacity, but he may have been the most monumental of all, with the guy who’s retired from everything except Sonic the Hedgehog sequels falling in love with cinema from the moment he saw the future Snake Plissken in one of his most famous Disney-era roles.
It’s well-known that the Carrey clan didn’t have an easy time, with the family frequently moving from place to place and even living out of a Volkswagen camper van for a spell. During that period, Jim’s older brother, John, took him to the cinema for the very first time at seven years of age to see Russell’s Dexter Riley headline The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.
“I saw it at the Willow Show on Yonge Street in Toronto,” he recalled. “I’ll never forget that day. I was so thrilled to be in a movie theatre.” It might have been a frivolous sci-fi comedy with the fresh-faced Russell continuing his early career association with the ‘Mouse House’, and it’s not even an especially good movie, but for Carrey, it was a monumental, life-changing moment.
At that age, he was already fully aware that he loved cinema, but seeing a feature on the big screen for the very first time unlocked something new, and it may not be a coincidence that the next year, when he was eight, the youngster started pulling faces in the mirror at home and realised he had a gift for impressions, which set the stage for everything that followed.
