We all hope to be creative in some sense, and as a new year dawns, we may be actively pursuing the muse. But there's no one secret to capturing it, even for artists: You never know just what's going to trigger it.

For Jim Carrey, it was a teacher. For Gillian Anderson, it was failing — then acing — an audition. For Tim Burton, it was digging in his heels.

"I was in the second grade, and my teacher was playing a record," recalls Carrey. "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."

From the beginning Tim Burton saw with a unique vision. "Every kid draws," he says, "it just gets beaten out of some people. By the time most kids are 10 they've been told, 'You can't draw like this.' 'You should draw like that.' That's why I always felt lucky that I never listened to anybody."

Nicole Kidman says she decided to become an actress when she was 14. "I got my first job, and that was amazing. I remember jumping up and down, and I earned $2,000 for the whole thing and thought, 'I'm rich. I can buy a washing machine.' At 14, somehow the idea of being able to buy a huge piece of machinery like that — why I wanted to own a washing machine, I don't know. It just seemed amazing that I could walk into a department store and say, 'I'm going to buy that.' "

But she didn't — she bought a pair of shoes instead.

Pierce Brosnan says he enjoyed going to the movies as a youngster, but never thought of becoming a movie actor. "When I really thought about it, it was something much more highbrow. I saw a production of 'Antigone' at the Royal Court Theater in the days of La Mama and the Living Theater. I'd never been to the theater. I was 17. I saw this production which just stopped me in my tracks, and I began to read plays and joined an arts lab, a theater company, and that was it."

Gillian Anderson says, "I don't remember there being a moment when I knew. My mother seems to remember, as mothers do, that it was something I was interested in from very early on. I don't remember that at all. I do know that when we were living in Michigan, there wasn't any theater at the school I was in, but I went for an audition at the community theater for 'Alice in Wonderland.'

"It was for the role of Alice, and there were probably 200 girls there. And I remember not getting cast and thinking, 'This isn't for me.' ... Years later, while I was in high school, I got an internship at a theater and made friends with the guy who was the theater director, and I told him that story.

"He said, 'Hang on a second, were you that British girl?' I said, 'I had a British accent.' He said, 'We came this close to casting you, but we didn't because we'd never seen you before — we didn't know if you'd be able to pull it off. You hadn't done anything in your life, and we went with a girl who'd done productions in this community.'

"I'd also auditioned for another community play just before that and was cast, and it changed something in me. I'd always been very rebellious, not a good student, very much into the underground punk scene and stuff like that. And when I did this play and experienced the stage with an audience, it transformed me. And all of a sudden, my grades went up, I started to study. It was like a piece of the puzzle had been put in."

Teri Hatcher reports she never made the decision to become an actress. "I was a math major in college and dropped into a role on 'The Love Boat' as a glorified extra. Once I got down here, I was fortunate enough to end up with opportunities like 'The Big Picture,' 'Soap Dish,' 'Murphy Brown,' 'Night Court.'

"And I think I ran into really good people and was able to learn on the job and absorb from those talented people. And I do work really hard at whatever it is I was doing. The next thing I knew, I was having a career."

Ray Romano recalls, "I remember me and my cousin fantasizing about putting on a big variety show. This was when we were, like, 10. But then as a teenager I joined up with a group of buddies of mine, and we put on a talent show for the community, the church community where all the teenagers used to hang out in the basement ...

"This group of guys I hung out with, there were five of us, decided to put on a show around sketches like 'Saturday Night Live,' and we did that, and it was a big success. We did parodies of people in the neighborhood. We called ourselves No Talent Incorporated, I remember, and we put on about three of these shows. That was my first introduction to performing. I was very drawn to it after that.

"But standup I didn't really consider. I was a fan of standup, and I watched them and would record them on TV but never entertained the thought of doing it until a friend of mine told me about audition night at a club. He told me the whole procedure where one after another of these guys auditioning would get up.

"I thought, 'Why don't I try it?' That's the first time I really thought about doing it, the first time ever."

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