Born on January 17, 1962, Jim Carrey’s childhood during the 1960s was primarily spent in a lower-middle-class environment in Ontario, Canada, before the severe financial hardships that defined his teenage years began.
He was the youngest of four children born to Percy and Kathleen Carrey in Newmarket, Ontario. His father, Percy, was a classically trained saxophonist who took a “safe” job as an accountant to support the family, while his mother, Kathleen, was a homemaker.
Even as a young child in the 1960s, Carrey displayed an obsessive need to entertain. He famously wore his tap shoes to bed just in case his parents needed cheering up in the middle of the night. At age eight, he began making faces before a mirror and discovered a talent for doing impressions. At age ten, Carrey wrote a letter to Carol Burnett of the Carol Burnett Show pointing out that he was already a master of impressions and should be considered for a role on the show; he was overjoyed when he received a form letter reply.
Carrey spent his early years in the borough of Scarborough, Ontario, part of Metropolitan Toronto, where he attended Blessed Trinity Catholic Elementary School in North York. His family later moved to Burlington, Ontario, where they would spend eight years; Jim attended Aldershot High School while there.
Some time later, his family became homeless and lived together in a Volkswagen van while teenage Jim and his brother spent months living in a tent in Charles Daley Park on the Lake Ontario shore in Lincoln, Ontario. The family struggled financially, however, their situation started improving once his father found employment in the accounting department at the Titan Wheels tire factory in Scarborough.
Furthermore, in return for living in the house across the street from the factory, the family—primarily teenage sons Jim and John—would work as janitors and security guards at the tire factory, doing eight-hour shifts from 6 pm into the next morning. Moving back to Scarborough, teenage Jim started attending Agincourt Collegiate Institute before dropping out of school on his sixteenth birthday. He began to perform comedy in downtown Toronto while continuing to work at the factory.
In a 2007 Hamilton Spectator interview, 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.” As a young man, he could see the steel mills across the Burlington Bay and often thought that was “where the great jobs were.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment