1968– 
ACTOR UNITED STATES
“Let’s put it this way,” says one studio head, “there’s Will Smith, and then there are the mortals.”
—NEWSWEEK
It was a neighborhood party, like so many others—Will had been performing at parties like this since he was just a kid. But there was something different about tonight. He could feel it.
He’d been emceeing with his friend DJ “Jazzy” Jeff, and they’d rocked the party—people loved Jeff’s beats and Will’s lyrics. Together, it seemed like they might really be able to go somewhere.
Whatever Will did, he knew, he was going to be big. Sure, he had a lot of charm and natural magnetism—that’s why his high school teachers had nicknamed him Prince. But just a few years earlier, that natural charm hadn’t kept his girlfriend from cheating on him. Ever since then, he’d been determined not just to be good, but to be the best at whatever he pursued.
Willard Christopher Smith Jr. was born in 1968 in Philadelphia. The son of a refrigeration engineer and an education professional (his mom worked for the School Board of Philadelphia), Will had plenty of school smarts, but he knew at an early age that he wanted to be an entertainer. He began performing rap music at parties around his neighborhood when he was just twelve, and this was how he began his collaboration with a childhood friend, DJ “Jazzy” Jeff Townes.
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, both actors, have two children—Jaden Christopher Syre Smith and Willow Camille Reign Smith—who have also chosen to pursue performing careers. Jaden has been nominated for three acting awards, and Willow’s song “Whip My Hair” peaked at #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2010.
It was here that he caught the attention of Jeff’s manager, James Lassiter, who would help to steer his career for the next twenty-two years. Eventually, James would establish Overbrook Entertainment, a production company named for the high school he and Will attended.
To his mom, education was everything—she even wanted him to apply to MIT. His SAT scores were pretty high, and he probably had what it took to get into MIT as a full-time college student. But Will wanted to be a rapper, a performer, and an entertainer. And since that was the career he had chosen, there was no way around it: he was going to be the best.
While Will’s mother emphasized the importance of college, she agreed to let him take a year off to pursue music—if it didn’t pan out, the deal was that he would focus on higher education. Will had had his first hit single with Jeff just a month shy of graduating high school under the stage name The Fresh Prince. The next year, 1987, he and Jeff came out with their first album, Rock the House, and went on tour with rap superstars Run DMC. It was here that Will got a taste of the big time and cemented his desire to reach as many people as possible with his art.
By the time their 1988 album He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper had gone multiplatinum and won the pair the first Grammy ever awarded to a hip-hop album—and Will had bought his mom a 300E Mercedes—college was no longer an issue. It was clear where Will was headed: straight to the big time.
Will had the opportunity to move to Los Angeles in 1991, at the age of twenty-one, to star in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. This television series about a likable urban kid who’d come to live with wealthy relatives would run for nearly six years and make him a household name. Will told James at the time that if they were headed to Hollywood, they should have a goal. And his ambitions were simple: he wanted to be the biggest movie star in the world.
Will Smith’s first nomination was for playing the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali in the movie Ali, in 2001.
There were people who might have chalked that up to Will’s youth, but James took him seriously. And so they began to study box office information on new movies and ticket sales, looking for trends. What was it, exactly, that made a blockbuster? Which movies grossed the most money?
They observed that, of the top ten movies of all time, ten had special effects or animation, nine had those two characteristics plus creatures, and eight had all three of those with a love story thrown in too. This was the information that would lead to them making Independence Day in 1996, which grossed $90 million in box office sales in its opening weekend.
Will’s transition from television to film in the mid-1990s wasn’t easy, though. Directors thought he was just a rapper (he and DJ Jazzy Jeff had won their second Grammy in 1991) and that his acting career was just a fluke—but Will got his break as a serious actor in the 1993 drama Six Degrees of Separation, in which he played a slick, young con man claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son. This performance turned a few heads, and Will’s over-the-top 1995 action film Bad Boys sealed the deal: The Fresh Prince was box-office gold in the making.
Since then, Will has consistently delivered box-office hits, carefully selecting his scripts and roles for their global appeal. His recent films have grossed as much or more overseas than they have in the United States.
Action-oriented Independence Day; Men in Black I & II ; Wild Wild West; I, Robot (which he also helped to produce); I Am Legend; and Hancock were all blockbusters, but Will has also seen success in the romantic comedy Hitch and the drama The Pursuit of Happyness, for which he received his second Oscar nomination.
Will is the only actor in history to have eight consecutive films gross over $100 million in the domestic box office, as well as the only actor to have eight consecutive films in which he starred that opened at the number one spot. Fourteen of the nineteen fiction films he has acted in have accumulated worldwide gross earnings of over $100 million, and four of them took in over $500 million from the global box office.
He has been nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, two Academy Awards, and has won two Grammy Awards. He has also produced, or helped to produce, numerous films.
In 2007, Newsweek named Will the most powerful actor in Hollywood. His handprints have been immortalized in the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, alongside the handprints of many Hollywood icons before him.