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Will Smith

b. 1968 Specialist

His grandmother told him to be clever instead of crude — he built a career on it

Portrait of Will Smith — TechCrunch — 2019 — CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Will Smith, born Willard Carroll Smith II in Philadelphia, grew up in the Wynnefield section of West Philadelphia in a Baptist household, the son of a school board administrator and an Air Force veteran turned refrigeration engineer; his parents separated when he was thirteen. He started rapping at twelve, and when his grandmother found profanity in his lyrics, she wrote him a note urging him to prove his intelligence through cleaner language instead of crude language — advice that shaped the persona he built his whole career on. In 1985 he met DJ Jazzy Jeff, Jeffrey Townes, at a house party, and the two formed a hip-hop duo the following year.

DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince's "Girls Ain't Nothing but Trouble" was an immediate hit in 1986, and the duo released five albums through 1994, becoming the first rap act to win a Grammy and taking the first-ever MTV Video Music Award for Best Rap Video. After running up a 2.8-million-dollar tax debt, Smith signed with NBC in 1990 for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which launched his acting career. Bad Boys, Independence Day, and Men in Black made him one of the biggest box-office draws of the 1990s; Oscar nominations followed for Ali in 2001 and The Pursuit of Happyness in 2006. In 2022 he won Best Actor for King Richard, becoming the fifth Black actor to win the award, in a film career whose combined worldwide grosses now exceed ten billion dollars.

That King Richard win happened on the same night as the moment that now overshadows it. At the March 2022 ceremony, Smith walked onstage and slapped presenter Chris Rock over a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head, a condition caused by alopecia, then shouted at Rock twice from his seat before returning less than an hour later to accept his award in tears. The Academy banned him from its ceremonies for ten years; he resigned his membership and apologized publicly weeks afterward. The fallout cost him work — Netflix scrapped a planned film, and the box-office failure of Emancipation later that year was widely tied to it. In October 2023, Jada Pinkett Smith revealed the couple had lived separately since 2016 without divorcing.

Smith released Based on a True Story in March 2025, his first solo album in nearly two decades, and remains attached to franchise sequels through his production company, Westbrook. In December 2025 he was named in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by violinist Brian King Joseph, which his legal team has denied. His public standing now runs on two separate tracks at once: an unmatched three-decade run as one of the highest-grossing actors in film history, and a single ninety seconds of live television that a large share of the public still brings up first.

Lifespan

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Will Smith's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air television
Six seasons on NBC, launched his acting career 1990
Bad Boys film 1995
Men in Black film 1997
Ali film
First Academy Award nomination 2001
King Richard film
Won Smith the Academy Award for Best Actor 2021

Life in brief

with age at each point

September 25, 1968 aged 0 Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1985 aged ~17 Meets DJ Jazzy Jeff at a house party
1986 aged ~18 "Girls Ain't Nothing but Trouble" becomes a hit
September 10, 1990 aged 21 The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air debuts on NBC
2001 aged ~33 Earns his first Academy Award nomination for Ali
March 27, 2022 aged 53 Wins Best Actor for King Richard and slaps Chris Rock at the same ceremony
October 2023 aged 55 Jada Pinkett Smith reveals the couple has lived separately since 2016
March 2025 aged 56 Releases Based on a True Story, his first solo album in nearly two decades