Carrey is now 46 and it seems hard to believe that it was 18 years ago that he first made a permanent impact on the North American pop-cultural psyche as a troupe member of the groundbreaking Fox TV show In Living Color. All hell then broke loose in 1993-94 when his films Ace Venture: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber were released.

The Canadian-born comic seems almost uncomfortable discussing his own fame and symbol as a global comic idol.

"Well, you know, it's hard to have a perspective on it from inside myself," Carrey says from a Beverly Hills hotel room. "I just kind of feel like I could be working in a factory again in a month, or something like that, loading trucks, which is kind of where I started out," Carrey recalls with what seems like genuine modesty. "Honestly, I don't have perspective on it, as it's just kind of one thing to the next, trying to do work, and trying to have fun with what's in front of me.

"I mean, even today I think to myself, you get that - 'Ugh, it's a junket,' kind of thing and then I have to go to that place of, 'I'm gonna try to enjoy every person who's in front of me in that moment, and try and live that way,' which is what I do.

"So I don't really think about iconic anything, but I just try to do work and have fun doing it and hopefully that translates."

Twice divorced and now dating Jenny McCarthy, Carrey remains ferociously guarded about a past that included living out of his car at one point while trying to make it as a comic in both his native Toronto and Los Angeles. Other Ontario cities - North York, Scarborough and Burlington, Ont. - were also home for awhile in his itinerant youth. In a Hamilton Spectator interview from a year ago, Carrey said that if show business hadn't worked, he may well have ended up working at the Hamilton steel mills - not that that was a totally unhappy prospect for him. He could see the Hamilton factories across Burlington Bay from where he lived in Burlington's Aldershot neighbourhood and thought, "Those were where the great jobs were."

Carrey debuted with a standup act at Toronto's Yuk Yuk's comedy club at age 15 and by 16 had quit school, determined to make a go of it as a comedian. His father, who had a spotty work history and is said to have had difficulties with mental illness, helped young Jim hone his act, which at the beginning included impressions of James Stewart and Henry Fonda.

Carrey told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes in 2004 that his mother was one source of inspiration for his physical comedy: "I had a sick mom, man. I wanted to make her feel better. Basically, I think she laid in bed and took a lot of pain pills. And I wanted to make her feel better. And I used to go in there and do impressions of praying mantises and weird things, and whatever. I'd bounce off the walls and throw myself down the stairs to make her feel better."

"Desperation" to help out his family, which had hit the "skids," he told Kroft, was his driving force. By the early 1980s, Carrey had moved to Los Angeles.

Carrey, who today makes $20-million per film, again alludes to a past that once tore him apart while talking about, of all topics, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, the latest film version of which he is shooting for director Robert Zemeckis. In the green-screen film, Carrey not only plays Ebenezer Scrooge but all of the ghosts, and says how much he identified with the Dickens world of past regret and future optimism.

"You know, if you're lucky, at some point in your life, you have that kind of Christmas Carol moment, and I certainly have, where things were kind of going south, and I had the opportunity to see how horrible things could have gotten, without them actually going there.

"I can't get into specifics, but I had my ghost of Christmas Future at a certain point in my life, that I went, like, 'Oh, wow. Okay, I gotta really start caring about the right things here,' and it's just a fantastic story," Carrey says thoughtfully.

Carrey went public with the news that he has had bouts of depression on 60 Minutes in 2004. Today he seems genuinely happy as he talks to the press. Of course, the buzz for his new animated movie Horton Hears a Who no doubt added to his glee during this chat, not long before the film was released in March. (Horton proved a winner at the box office that first weekend, making $45.1-million in the U.S., debuting in top spot and representing Carrey's best weekend since Bruce Almighty in 2003.)

Horton was Carrey's second Dr. Suess adaptation, following How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2003), which took in a mammoth $260-million in North American box office. Carrey agrees that Seuss transcends age and demographics, and is clearly impassioned about the messages that Seuss delivers to his readers.

"I think as far as kids go, the thing that attracts them to this is not the deeper concepts involved, but really just the fact that Seuss's creativity was so incredible.

"I've always been drawn to things that are different, because I felt odd anyway, as a child, so anything odd, I go, 'Oh, those are my people,' and that's what draws kids."

There is it again - the allusion to his irregular upbringing. Pressed as to what made Carrey odd as a child, he laughs slightly. "I was the baby of the family and I guess my father was funny and strange. So I looked at him and went, 'Wow, everybody's looking at my Dad, and everybody's laughing at my Dad,' and I just immediately kind of wanted to be that. So I locked myself in my room when all the other kids were outside playing, and was devising ways to make myself appear to be somehow different."

One of the more interesting themes of Horton is the notion that we are all specks in relation to the universe. Whoville is actually a speck that Horton protects from an aggressive world. Carrey believes that like the diminutive citizens of Whoville, we are all specks. "There's no question about it and that's how I feel. I mean, I'm an interesting speck, but I think that's how I've always thought, in those terms. I mean, how can you look at the sky at night and not feel that you're a speck somewhere?"

Carrey is continuing to work on Christmas Carol and is up to the challenge of further diversifying his gallery of characters.

"Ebenezer is such a great thing for me, because again, I get to play all kinds of different roles in the film and first of all, the process is so fascinating. You're literally in an empty warehouse with cameras around you and you have maybe a frame of a fireplace, or something like that, then you rehearse, and they go, 'Can we take this away?' And you're sitting on a chair. And you have to create the entire world in your head.

"Also, it's kind of a classical version of A Christmas Carol, so I'm playing Ebenezer Scrooge at four different ages. All with English accents. So there's a lot of really wonderful work and challenge in it."

Carrey's hope for this latest Carol is, "I want it to fly in the UK, I want it to be good, and I want them to go, like, 'Yeah, that's for real.'"

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IT ALL STARTED ...

"I was in the second grade and my teacher was playing a record," recalls Jim Carrey in an MCT Photo Service release. "I was mocking all the musicians. She said, 'If you're going to do that, do it in front of the whole class.' And they went nuts. She asked me to do it at the Christmas assembly and from then on that was the only thing I could think of doing. I always knew I wanted to be funny."

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GOLDEN JIM