Before making millions of people laugh, Jim Carrey tried to make one person smile: his mother.
As a child, he saw her spend long periods in bed, struggling with health problems and worries that he was too small to fully understand. He couldn't solve what was happening, but he found out he had a particular instrument: he could make her laugh.
He entered his room turning his face, changing his voice, inventing characters and imitating the people he saw on television. Those little performances had no stage or audience. There was only one child who sought, through comics, to lighten for a few minutes the atmosphere of the house.
The following years were far from simple. When his father Percy lost his job, the Carrey family went through serious economic difficulties. For a period of time they lived in a van and Jim, still a teenager, worked together with his family as a house cleaner, reconciling heavy shifts with the school.
And yet he kept making imitations.
At the age of 15, one of the first important occasions came: to climb the stage of the Yuk Yuk's in Toronto. The debut didn't go well. Instead of abandoning everything, he continued to perfect his repertoire until he gained a space in the Canadian comedy scene.
Then the United States, Los Angeles and other years of attempts arrived before the real breakthrough. In the early 1990s, he entered the cast of the TV show In Living Color, where the general public finally began to know that extraordinary capacity to transform the face and body.
In 1994 something extraordinary happened: in the same year Ace Ventura came out - The Teach, The Mask and Scemo & more dumb. Within a few months Jim Carrey became one of the most recognizable stars in world cinema.
Those impossible damps, exasperated movements and absurd voices that made millions of spectators laugh were not born in Hollywood. They were the result of something that had begun to do many years before, when there were no millionaire contracts, cameras or red carpets.
Carrey would later also show a completely different face. Films like The Truman Show and Man on the Moon showed that behind the comedian capable of deforming his body there was also a dramatic interpreter of great intensity.
And this is perhaps the most human detail of his history.
Before knowing that capacity would become his job, even before imagining Hollywood, Jim Carrey had already discovered how powerful a laughter could be.
Not because he gave him fame or success.
But because, as a child, it was one of the few gifts he could make to his mother.