Will Smith
The actor writes about his abusive father
Will Smith, here at a premiere last year, is about to publish his autobiography “Will”.
© Xavier Collin / Image Press Agency / ImageCollect
Will Smith’s autobiography will appear soon. In it he writes about his abusive father and how a certain moment shaped him.
Will Smith (53) had a complicated relationship with his late father Will Sr., as the Hollywood star explains in his new autobiography “Will”, which will be released on November 9th. He also reports on a traumatic experience in his childhood that shaped him.
He was “violent” but always there
“My father was violent,” writes Smith in a preliminary excerpt, which is available to the US magazine “People”. But he was also at every game and every performance of his son. “He was an alcoholic, but he was sober at every premiere of every single one of my films,” explains the actor and rapper. His father listened to each of his records and visited every studio. The same “intense perfectionism” with which his father “terrorized” the family also ensured that Smith never went hungry and that food was on the table every evening.
A specific moment shaped the star’s life, as he continues. At the age of nine, Smith watched his father hit his mother Caroline on the side of the head so hard that “she collapsed. I saw her spit blood. This moment in this bedroom probably has more as any other moment in my life defines who I am “.
With everything he does, he apologizes
Smith’s parents separated when he was a teenager and later divorced. In everything that he achieved or did in his career, be it the awards, his characters or the many laughs, “a fine thread of apologies to my mother for my inactivity that day” is hidden. He let her down, did not oppose his father and was a “coward”. What the world knows as the entertainer and megastar Will Smith is to a large extent a “carefully crafted and finely honed character” that he designed to protect himself. “To hide from the world. To hide the coward.”
Decades later, the violence perpetrated by his father still weighs on the 53-year-old. One night when he was caring for Will Sr., who had cancer, the actor was in “darkness”. “As a kid, I always told myself that one day I would avenge my mother,” says Smith. That when he was big and strong and no longer a coward, he would kill his father. At that moment he thought about pushing his father down a flight of stairs in a wheelchair. “When the decades of pain, anger and resentment subsided,” he only shook his head and pushed his father into the bathroom.