France is known for charting its own course, particularly in the realm of popular culture. This independent spirit was on full display with the recent announcement that Jim Carrey is set to receive one of the country’s most prestigious artistic accolades.

Carrey, celebrated for his roles in films like “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Mask,” and “Dumb and Dumber,” will be honored with an Honorary César. This distinction, akin to the Oscars, will be awarded at the 51st César Awards ceremony in Paris next February.

The French Academy praised Carrey, a former master of slapstick comedy, as “one of the most original voices in modern cinema.” They lauded his body of work, both on-screen and off, for demonstrating that cinema has the potential to transcend mere entertainment.

“His journey represents a relentless audacity, consistently challenging the boundaries of performance and art,” the Academy enthused.

Awards organizations are seldom conservative in their praise for those they honor.

Yet, even Carrey’s most dedicated admirers might hesitate to characterize his cinematic career, marked by his exuberant and expansive comedic expressions, as an embodiment of “relentless audacity.”

The French appear to have a strong affection for the Canadian-American star. Carrey, who has claimed he’s descended from a French pirate, was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2010. But he’s never had so much as a sniff of an Oscar, failing ever to earn a nomination.

And as for ‘constantly pushing the boundaries of performance and art’, apart from appearing in the Sonic The Hedgehog animated family movie franchise, based on a popular video game character, he hasn’t made a film for nearly a decade.

The French Academy described Jim Carrey, the star of The Mask (pictured) and erstwhile king of slapstick comedies as ‘one of the most original voices in modern cinema’

In the Sonic movies, Carrey – wearing a huge handlebar moustache – has to ply his acting skills with co-stars who are largely computer generated.

Carrey, 63, will help churn out the fourth instalment of the Sonic franchise in 2027, which will no doubt help his bank balance (two of his Sonic films have been the highest-grossing movies in his career) but do little for his artistic legacy.

The most recent non-Sonic film he made, a bleak 2016 detective drama called Dark Crimes, was so terrible it earned nought per cent on the review site Rotten Tomatoes and international box office takings of just $27,000 (which in industry terms is so small it is listed as zero).

His other film from 2016 (in which Carrey only had a cameo role) was a dystopian thriller, The Bad Batch, which was also a humiliating flop that barely made it onto cinema screens.

For an actor who had commanded $20million a film in the 1990s and was at one point Hollywood’s highest earner, it provided further confirmation of how far Carrey’s star has fallen.

Until Sonic zoomed to the rescue, he hadn’t, in fact, had a hit movie (one grossing more than $100million) since Disney’s animated version A Christmas Carol in 2009, in which he voiced Scrooge. That was also the last year when a Carrey film – the black comedy I Love You Phillip Morris, co-starring Ewan McGregor – was well-reviewed by critics.

So, apart from prompting some head-scratching over their judging criteria, the most likely consequence of the French academy’s announcement is to prompt the obvious question: what happened to Jim Carrey?

From 2005 to 2010, Carrey had a relationship with actress and Playboy model Jenny McCarthy. He joined her in making public – and entirely discredited claims – that vaccines cause autism

Carrey had romantic relationships with actress Renee Zellweger (pictured), Mad Men star January Jones and singer Linda Ronstadt – the latter when he was 21 and she was 36

Indeed the disappearing act has been so complete that the only time he’s made headlines in the past few years has been in his fruitless attempts to sell his home in the smart Brentwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles.

For some online, the house had become something of a metaphor for his diminishing career.

After buying the 12,700 square-foot five-bedroom property for $3.8million at the height of his fame in 1994, he listed it for sale in 2023 for $28.9million, calling it ‘a place of enchantment and inspiration’ for more than ‘30 very creative and prosperous years’. 

He continued: ‘Every night the owls sang me lullabies and every morning I sipped my cup of joe with the hawks and hummingbirds, under a giant grandfather pine.’

There might have been a time when such an A-list endorsement would have been guaranteed to work wonders on a property’s retail prospects. But not for Carrey. 

He had to slash the price repeatedly – including after a buyer backed out of an agreement to buy it for nearly $10million less than the original price – before he finally managed to offload it in August for $17million.

Carrey, once estimated to be worth $300million, had fuelled suspicions he was short of money when he announced at the London premiere of Sonic The Hedgehog 3 last December that he decided to make a third instalment because, ‘I bought a lot of stuff and I need the money, frankly’.

Apart from appearing in the Sonic The Hedgehog movies, Carrey hasn’t made a film for nearly a decade

A source close to him told the Daily Mail the actor, whose public pronouncements have to be taken with a heavy pinch of salt, had been ‘joking’ about financial trouble. He sold the property ‘because he just wanted a change – he’s been there almost 30 years’, said the source.

That change has involved relocating to a waterfront property he now owns on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where Carrey confirmed he was a resident in 2017. He spends much of his time on the island – 2,600 miles and a six-hour flight from Hollywood – and displays his artwork (currently Carrey’s chief creative outlet) at a gallery in the resort of Wailea.

In 2018, Carrey revealed: ‘You could describe my home life as an isolated life. I spend a lot of time by myself but I like being by myself, so it’s OK. That might be strange to some people, but I enjoy it.’ 

The source said he is working on a number of film projects that are still being finalised so they can’t yet be revealed. Although currently at a sensitive stage in discussions, these projects will hopefully be confirmed next year, said the insider, and – roll of drums – have nothing to do with Sonic The Hedgehog.

It has now been revealed that one of them is a live-action feature version of The Jetsons, the 1960s cartoon series about a futuristic family – George and Jane Jetson, and their children Judy and Elroy – revived in the 1980s. Carrey is reportedly in talks over taking a starring role in the Warner Bros project.

The return of Carrey in a film anyone over the age of 12 might want to see would certainly be a notable development for the actor, who in early 2022 announced he was ‘fairly serious’ about retiring from Hollywood.

When Dark Crimes – Carrey’s last starring role, with Charlotte Gainsbourg (pictured) – bombed dismally, some Hollywood commentators criticised his formulaic performances and polarising manic on-screen personality, which has always been a Marmite thing

He said at the time: ‘I really like my quiet life. And I really love putting paint on canvas, and I really love my spiritual life, and I feel like – and this is something you might never hear another celebrity say as long as time exists – I have enough. I’ve done enough. I am enough.’

He didn’t box himself in entirely about his retirement, though, adding: ‘It depends – if the angels bring some sort of script that’s written in gold ink, that says to me that it’s going to be really important for people to see, I might. I might continue down the road, but I’m taking a break.’

The producers of Sonic The Hedgehog 3 reportedly did indeed send him a script written in gold ink.

And, while it’s hard to imagine he considered it ‘really important for people to see’, Carrey agreed to make it. Leaving aside the Sonic films, his disappearance from the big screen is all the more surprising given how it once seemed impossible to avoid him. In 1994 alone, for instance, he starred in three of the year’s most successful films.

The Hollywood star with his first wife Melissa Womer and their daughter Jane. In 1995, his ex described how Carrey regularly stayed up crying into the early hours of the morning

His second wife was Lauren Holly, who he met on the set of the 1994 comedy film Dumb And Dumber. Their marriage lasted nine months

It must have been an extraordinary moment for a performer whose family struggled so badly financially when his musician father lost his job that they had to move into a trailer home.

Carrey was 15 at the time and it forced him to drop out of school and work as a cleaner at a tyre factory to support his parents.

Carrey has indicated that memories of those straitened circumstances had an effect on his career, steering him towards crowd-pleasing money-spinners, despite critically-acclaimed roles as, for example, the unwitting reality TV star in the 1998 satire The Truman Show, and in the 2004 black comedy Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

But if Carrey really does plan a comeback beyond CGI video game spin off films, he might find enthusiasm in short supply.

When Dark Crimes – his last starring role – bombed dismally, some Hollywood commentators criticised his formulaic performances and polarising manic on-screen personality, which has always been a Marmite thing. A little of Carrey goes a long way, complained detractors.

Critics also noted that he stopped being the endearing funnyman of family entertainment and started being an endless source of political pronouncements which antagonised both Left-wing audiences – with his anti-vaccine views – and Right-wing ones, with Carrey’s hatred of Donald Trump.

He married twice, first to former actress Melissa Womer in 1987, and then to his Dumb And Dumber co-star Lauren Holly in 1996.

After working on the 1999 film Man On The Moon, in which Carrey played late comic actor Andy Kaufman (pictured), his co-star Martin Freeman described him as ‘self-aggrandising, selfish and narcissistic’, and his off-screen behaviour as ‘deranged’ and ‘pretentious nonsense’

Later, from 2005 to 2010, he had a relationship with actress and Playboy model Jenny McCarthy, who claims a quack remedy cured her son of autism. Carrey joined McCarthy in making public – and entirely discredited claims – that vaccines cause autism.

One critic dismissed his anti-vaccine statements as ‘angry, dense and immune to reason’.

Fellow actors, meanwhile, complained about his extreme approach to ‘method acting’, which involved inhabiting the role even off-camera.

British actor Martin Freeman worked with Carrey in the film Man On The Moon, in which the latter played late comic actor Andy Kaufman. Freeman later described Carrey as ‘self-aggrandising, selfish and narcissistic’, and his off-screen behaviour as ‘deranged’ and ‘pretentious nonsense’. 

Carrey insisted on being called ‘Andy’ on and off the set and, disturbingly, pretended to be him even when the real Andy Kaufman’s family visited the studio, said Freeman. Carrey revealed he’d also stayed in character during a two-hour phone conversation with director Ron Howard to discuss another film, How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

For his part, Carrey says he’s had a long and uncomfortable relationship with fame, which has been further complicated by depression.

In 1995, his former wife, Melissa Womer, described how he regularly stayed up crying into the early hours of the morning and said: ‘I’ve learned that the smile he wears is the biggest mask of all.’

In his surreal 2020 book Memoirs And Misinformation, which was part novel and part memoir, he said his career never recovered from I Love You Phillip Morris, which suffered distribution problems in large part because it contained a scene in which he is depicted having sex with Ewan McGregor.

Carry claimed that both Disney and Paramount subsequently put their projects with him on hold and his agents forced him, instead, to do the awful 2011 family comedy, Mr Popper’s Penguins.

In 2012, Carrey became involved with Cathriona White, an Irish make-up artist. Three years later she was found dead just four days after they’d broken up. She left a suicide note saying that she’d been heartbroken by his decision to split up with her

However, he couldn’t blame the film industry for his rocky private life. Carrey had romantic relationships with actress Renee Zellweger, Mad Men star January Jones and singer Linda Ronstadt – the latter when he was 21 and she was 36.

Many of them later described him as extremely selfish and terrified of commitment. Then, in 2012, Carrey became involved with Cathriona White, an Irish make-up artist, who was married. 

Three years later she was found dead of a prescription drug overdose just four days after she’d broken up with Carrey for a second time. She left a suicide note saying that she’d been heartbroken by his decision to split up with her.

Her husband, Mark Burton, filed an explosive wrongful death lawsuit against Carrey, who’d been a pallbearer at his lover’s funeral in County Tipperary.

Burton said the star had used his ‘immense wealth and celebrity status’ to illegally obtain and distribute ‘highly addictive’ prescription drugs to Ms White despite knowing she was prone to depression and had already attempted suicide.

For good measure, he also accused Carrey of giving his wife a trio of venereal diseases.

Carrey denied he’d been responsible (while admitting the fatal drugs were his) but the following year, 2016, Cathriona’s mother, Brigid Sweetman, filed her own wrongful death suit against him, damning him as ‘a dishonest Hollywood celebrity who thinks he can say anything and fool people just because he is famous’.

Both lawsuits were dismissed in 2018 but not before Carrey’s public image had taken a battering.

In a rare interview last December, Carrey said that stepping away from Hollywood had given him a ‘new appreciation for it’.

He went on: ‘I also value getting out of people’s faces. I mean, some people just want to be in people’s faces all the time, and I don’t, so I like to give them a rest.’

But will his critics agree that a decade away is long enough?