Actor Jim Carrey. Photo / Getty Images
The distraught ex-lover caught up in the tragic suicide of his beautiful young girlfriend just days after they split up - it's not a role we usually associate with Jim Carrey, Hollywood's manic king of comedy.
Instead, we remember the 53-year-old best for stealing the show in a string of comedies - The Mask, Ace Ventura, Dumb And Dumber - making him the world's highest paid actor in the mid-90s.
The rubber-faced star managed to tone down the lunacy in later films such as The Truman Show and Bruce Almighty, but that rictus grin was never far from the surface.
Nobody is smiling now, however. Cathriona White, a 28-year-old Irish make-up artist, was discovered dead at her rented Los Angeles home just four days after she split with Carrey for the second time.
A note she reportedly left mentioned breaking up with him on September 24 - the same day on which he was photographed chatting with fellow guests, including at least two attractive young women, at a Hollywood party.
The same evening, Miss White posted the first of several worrying messages on social media. "Signing off Twitter, I hope I have been a light to my nearest and dearest," she wrote. On Instagram, she quoted from Irish poet W. B. Yeats: "Faeries, come take me out of this dull world."
It was claimed yesterday that Miss White, who is the same age as Carrey's daughter, had struggled for years with depression and felt she "had nothing to live for" after splitting up from a man she was "madly in love with".
Read more:
• Jim Carrey's ex-girlfriend found dead
One of the reported problems with their relationship was Miss White's shyness: she is said to have hated accompanying him to Hollywood parties, preferring instead to be at home.
Her mother, Brigid, has revealed that she herself suffers from depression and Carrey's own struggle with the condition throughout his life is well known. Sources say the couple were drawn together by their shared suffering and would spend days locked in her bedroom with the curtains drawn.
Carrey has said he is "shocked and deeply saddened" by Miss White's death, describing her as a "truly kind and delicate Irish flower, too delicate for this soil".
If friends and family now grieving back home in Britain ever thought that the small-town girl from Cappawhite had struck gold by landing Carrey as a boyfriend, they ought to have looked beyond his breezy screen persona.
The pair started seeing each other in the summer of 2012 after meeting on a film set, but had broken up by the following March. They apparently reunited in May when they were seen holding hands as they strolled through New York.
A string of women - all of them much more famous and wise to the ways of Tinseltown than the reportedly vulnerable and gentle Miss White - have had messy relationships with the actor. They include Bridget Jones star Renee Zellweger, Mad Men actress January Jones, his Dumb And Dumber co-star Lauren Holly and ex-Playboy bunny Jenny McCarthy.
None has managed to tame the bachelor instincts of a man who has made some 58 films and raked in more than $1 billion at the box office. Some have emerged spitting with fury over his treatment of them.
The Canadian-born actor has, by his own admission, tried for years to stave off depression with drugs and alcohol, although he insists he no longer takes any stimulants - even coffee.
He is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a workaholic. It is said he would spend eight hours before a set of mirrors perfecting expressions and, at the height of his fame, would work all day and well into the night for weeks on end. Despite insisting he "didn't get weird till I was older", Carrey has described a hyper-active, attention-seeking childhood in Ontario. He was prone to violent temper tantrums and would create macabre art - such as a picture of his father clutching a gun he entitled Waiting To Die - which alarmed his family.
When his father lost his job as an accountant and his mother fell ill, the family were so poor that they had to live in a van as the children - still at school - worked in the evenings as cleaners.
Moving to LA to establish himself as a stand-up comic in his late teens, Carrey had an eight-month relationship with the singer Linda Ronstadt when he was 22 and she was 37.
In 1987, he married his first wife, Melissa Womer, after meeting her at the Comedy Store stand-up venue, where he would perform on stage (his act included prancing around naked but for a sock over his manhood) and she was a waitress.
They had a daughter, Jane, but divorced in 1995. Life could be tough with an "extremely depressive person", she said, recalling how he would sit on the floor and howl, and she would "sit up counseling him through it until four or five in the morning on many, many nights".
But then Carrey became famous with the 1994 comedy film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and his spirits soared. After that box-office hit, Carrey admitted he had had trouble coming home to domesticity and Melissa recalled: "He decided he wanted to enjoy success from the perspective of a single man."
By the time they separated, he was already in a relationship with actress Lauren Holly.
Ever the exhibitionist, Carrey burst on to the set of a film she was making to propose with a huge ring. They married in a surprisingly low-key, mountain-top ceremony in 1996.
At the time, Carrey acknowledged he had hated being the mega-star bachelor who "could get laid every hour on the hour... I quickly found out that I'm not the dog that I thought it was maybe possible for me to be". He claimed he wanted to settle down "at a certain point" with a woman he could grow old with. Even so, he insisted, monogamy was not man's natural state. It was certainly not his.
His marriage to Holly lasted just eight months before they divorced, citing the usual "irreconcilable differences".
Carrey has previously vowed he will never marry again and he has proved as good as his word. Romances with a string of actresses led nowhere - and not always for want of trying on the woman's part.
Relationships came and went with January Jones, who played Don Draper's neglected wife in Mad Men, the X-Files actress Laurie Holden and a Danish model, Anine Bing. He also had an 18-month relationship with A-lister Zellweger, after they starred in the comedy film Me, Myself And Irene.
It appears she was as desperate to settle down with a good man as the fictional character she played. The couple were reportedly engaged after Carrey presented her with a $60,000 ring during a candlelit dinner in London, where she was filming Bridget Jones in 2000.
However, it is claimed, Carrey dragged his feet and Zellweger gave him an ultimatum to marry her within six months. When the actor dithered, they had a furious row at his Los Angeles home and a devastated Zellweger ended up going to Hawaii - a Christmas holiday they had planned as a pre-honeymoon - on her own.
The longest recent survivour in his fickle affections is former Playboy pin-up Jenny McCarthy. They started a five-year relationship in 2005 and were brought closer together through autism, a condition that afflicted Evan, her young son from a previous marriage.
After the couple split up, McCarthy launched a bitter attack on Carrey, accusing him of walking out on a boy who had regarded him as a father figure.
Still, Carrey has ploughed on in his supremely self-absorbed way. Despite now being a grandfather, in interviews he manages to come across like an adolescent when talk turns to love and commitment.
"As far as dating and stuff goes, I don't know," he said last year, as he admitted his first stint with Cathriona White was over. "I'm in love with everybody, all shapes and sizes!"
He added grandly: "I want to share myself and my life with people I care about. I am seeing people and if someone bowls me over, that's great. But I am not in a state of need right now in that regard."
And the needs of others? Those were left unsaid. Psychiatrists may have views on whether two manic depressives can ever be the right match for each other, but falling in love with Jim Carrey has always been a sure route to despair.
Where to get help:
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 (available 24/7)
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO) (available 24/7)
• Youth services: (06) 3555 906
• Youthline: 0800 376 633
• Kidsline: 0800 543 754 (available 24/7)
• Whatsup: 0800 942 8787 (1pm to 11pm)
• The Word
• Depression helpline: 0800 111 757 (available 24/7)
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155
• CASPER Suicide Prevention
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
- Daily Mail
The Hollywood star is 70 but has no plans to retire from acting.