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Comedy star Jim Carrey was given a Cesar d’honneur, a special lifetime-style tribute, at France’s top film awards ceremony in Paris, as the 51st Cesar Awards put the spotlight on his wide-ranging career and recent step back from Hollywood.
France’s leading movie awards handed Canadian-American actor Jim Carrey a special honor on Thursday, and he took it up with a speech delivered in French. After speaking, the 64-year-old actor joked, "How was my French? Almost mediocre, right?" He also brought up a French relative in his family line, saying it dated back to “around 300 years ago.”
The awards night opened with a sketch that played up Carrey’s legacy. Ceremony presenter Benjamin Lavernhe revisited one of Carrey’s best-known films, “The Mask,” as the event set the tone for a tribute centred on the actor’s comedy imprint.
Carrey’s career started out in stand-up comedy before it took off in the 1990s through cult films such as “Dumb and Dumber,” “The Mask,” and “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.” He was described as a standout figure of American cinema and was compared to comic luminaries, including Jerry Lewis, while the ceremony’s honor also pointed to how his work has ranged across styles and genres.
After his early comedic rise, Carrey moved toward more serious parts and won a Golden Globe for “The Truman Show” (1998), in which he played an ordinary man who comes to realise his entire life has been orchestrated for television. He later picked up acclaim for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), a story about a lovelorn man who decides to have memories of his former girlfriend, played by Kate Winslet, erased from his mind.
Several international box-office successes followed, including the “Sonic” franchise, before Carrey stepped back from the film world in the early 2020s. The Cesar tribute framed the honour as recognition of an eclectic acting path, while also noting his reduced Hollywood presence in recent years.
Alongside Carrey’s tribute, American filmmaker Richard Linklater won the best director Cesar for his 2025 film “Nouvelle Vague.” The black-and-white work focuses on the shooting of Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic “Breathless.”
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