82 Facts About Will Smith

Willard Carroll Smith II was born on September 25,1968 and is an American actor, rapper, and film producer.

Will Smith has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA Award, and four Grammy Awards.

Will Smith released the solo albums Big Willie Style, Willennium, Born to Reign, and Lost and Found, which spawned the US number-one singles "Gettin' Jiggy wit It" and "Wild Wild West".

Will Smith has won four Grammy Awards for his recording career.

Will Smith began his acting career starring as a fictionalized version of himself on the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1993 and 1994.

Will Smith achieved wider fame as a leading man with the film franchises Bad Boys and Men in Black, where he respectively portrayed Mike Lowrey and Agent J After starring in the thrillers Independence Day and Enemy of the State, he received Academy Award for Best Actor nominations for his portrayals of Muhammad Ali in Ali and Chris Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness.

Will Smith starred in commercially successful films such as I, Robot, Shark Tale, Hitch, I Am Legend, Hancock, Seven Pounds, Suicide Squad, and Aladdin.

The event earned substantial media coverage and criticism, with Will Smith ultimately resigning from the Academy along with being banned from attending all their events for ten years.

Willard Carroll Smith II was born on September 25,1968, in Philadelphia, to Caroline, a school board administrator, and Willard Carroll Smith Sr.

Will Smith grew up in West Philadelphia's Wynnefield neighborhood and was raised Baptist.

Will Smith has an elder sister named Pamela and two younger siblings, twins Harry and Ellen.

Will Smith attended Our Lady of Lourdes, a private Catholic elementary school in Philadelphia, and Overbrook High School.

Will Smith's parents separated when he was 13 and divorced around the year 2000.

Will Smith said that this influenced his decision not to use profanity in his music.

Townes and Will Smith were introduced to each other by chance in 1985, as Townes was performing at a house party only a few doors down from Will Smith's residence, and he was missing his hype man.

Will Smith enlisted a friend, Ready Rock C, to join as the beatboxer of the group, making them a trio.

Will Smith became known for light-hearted story-telling raps and capable, though profanity-free, "battle" rhymes.

The single became a hit a month before Will Smith graduated from high school.

Will Smith spent money freely around 1988 and 1989 and underpaid his income taxes.

Will Smith was struggling financially in 1990 when the NBC television network signed him to a contract and built a sitcom, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, around him.

Will Smith set for himself the goal of becoming "the biggest movie star in the world", studying box office successes' common characteristics.

In 1989, Smith was arrested in relation to an alleged assault on his record promoter, William Hendricks; the charges were later dismissed.

In 1996, Will Smith starred as part of an ensemble cast in Roland Emmerich's Independence Day.

In 1998, Will Smith starred with Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State.

Will Smith portrayed heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali in the 2001 biopic Ali.

In 2002, following a four-year musical hiatus, Will Smith returned with his third album Born to Reign, which reached number 13 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold by the RIAA.

In 2005, Will Smith was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for attending three premieres in a 24-hour time span.

On December 10,2007, Will Smith was honored at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

Will Smith left an imprint of his hands and feet outside the theater in front of many fans.

Later that month, Will Smith starred in the film I Am Legend, released on December 14,2007.

Will Smith himself has said that he considers the film to be "aggressively unique".

On December 1,2008, TV Guide reported that Will Smith was selected as one of America's top ten most fascinating people of 2008 for a Barbara Walters ABC special that aired on December 4,2008.

In 2008, Will Smith was reported to be developing a film entitled The Last Pharaoh, in which he would be starring as Taharqa.

Will Smith later starred in the superhero film Hancock, which grossed $227,946,274 in the United States and Canada and had a worldwide total of $624,386,746.

Will Smith again reprised his role as Agent J with Men in Black 3, which opened on May 25,2012, his first major starring role in four years.

In 2013, Will Smith starred in After Earth with his son Jaden.

Will Smith starred opposite Margot Robbie in the romance drama Focus, released on February 27,2015.

Will Smith played Nicky Spurgeon, a veteran con artist who takes a young, attractive woman under his wing.

Will Smith was set to star in the sci-fi thriller Brilliance, an adaptation of Marcus Sakey's novel of the same name scripted by Jurassic Park writer David Koepp, but he left the project to work on the Ridley Scott-produced sports drama Concussion.

In Concussion, Will Smith played Dr Bennet Omalu of the Brain Injury Research Institute, the first to discover chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

In 2016, Will Smith played Deadshot in the supervillain team-up action film Suicide Squad.

Later that year, Will Smith starred in director David Frankel's drama Collateral Beauty, playing a New York advertising executive who succumbs to a deep depression after a personal tragedy.

Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney criticized Will Smith's performance writing as "the least interesting component in a madly overqualified cast".

Will Smith collaborated with his director from Suicide Squad, David Ayer.

Will Smith performed the official song "Live It Up" alongside American singer Nicky Jam and Kosovar singer Era Istrefi at the closing ceremony of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Moscow, Russia.

Will Smith was featured on rapper Logic's song "Don't Be Afraid To Be Different", from his fifth studio album Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Will Smith appeared as an assassin who faces off against a younger clone of himself in Ang Lee's Gemini Man, released on October 11,2019.

Later that year, Will Smith had his second starring role in an animated film, in Spies in Disguise, opposite Tom Holland.

Will Smith voiced Lance Sterling, a spy who teams up with the nerdy inventor who creates his gadgets.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said that Will Smith was asked to leave the ceremony but he refused.

Later in the night, Will Smith was named Best Actor for King Richard and apologized to the Academy and the other nominees, but not to Rock, in his acceptance speech.

Will Smith remained at the ceremony until its conclusion and participated in the celebrations later that evening.

ABC, AMPAS, and the Screen Actors Guild condemned Will Smith following the incident, prompting an investigation by the Academy's Board of Governors.

Rock declined to press charges against Will Smith, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Will Smith's resignation means he is no longer able to vote on Oscar nominations as a member of the Academy.

Several film projects that Will Smith had been involved in were put on hold as a result of the controversy.

Producer Todd Black partially attributed the failure to Will Smith's involvement following the Oscar incident.

Additionally, Will Smith is attached to star in the science fiction films Brilliance and Resistor.

In September 2023, it was reported by VIBE magazine that Joyner Lucas and Will Smith would be working together on a joint album.

On July 24,2024, it was announced that Will Smith had signed a new distribution deal with SLANG, a newly formed independent label.

On July 26,2024, Will Smith released another single "Work of Art", featuring his son Jaden and Russ.

In 2025, Will Smith announced his fifth studio album, Based on a True Story, which was released on March 28,2025.

On March 23,2025, Will Smith performed at the 2025 CONCACAF Nations League final at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.

Will Smith acted in two episodes of the sitcom All of Us, and has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and the David Blaine: Real or Magic TV special.

Will Smith married actress Jada Koren Pinkett on December 31,1997.

Will Smith has said he wanted a polyamorous relationship with actress Halle Berry and ballerina Misty Copeland but ultimately abandoned the idea after therapy.

In October 2023, Pinkett Will Smith stated that she and Will Smith had been separated since 2016, though they have no intention to divorce.

In 2018, Will Smith celebrated his 50th birthday by performing a bungee jump from a helicopter in the Grand Canyon.

Will Smith was raised in a Baptist household and attended a Baptist church and Catholic school.

Will Smith was the most spiritually certain person that I had ever met in my entire life.

In 2018, Will Smith performed the Hindu rite of abhisheka of Shiva at Haridwar, India.

Will Smith performed an arti of the holy river Ganga.

Will Smith has said that he feels a deep connection to Hindu spirituality and Indian astrology.

Will Smith donated $4,600 to the 2008 presidential campaign of Democrat Barack Obama.

In 2021, Will Smith announced that production of his upcoming film, Emancipation, was being pulled from the US state of Georgia because of the recent passage of the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which critics viewed as a restrictive voting law, negatively impacting non-white voters.

Will Smith has often been noted for achieving groundbreaking success throughout his musical career, and with his work as an actor in television and film.

Will Smith has been cited as one of the "greatest actors" of his generation by several publications.

Will Smith launched his acting career by starring in the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; the show's success is considered to be a watershed moment for Hip-Hop and Black television, with many publications referring to it as one of the "Greatest Sitcoms of All Time".

Will Smith currently holds the record for the most consecutive $100-million-plus hits at the US box office, with eight.

Will Smith starred as Daryl Ward in the film Bright, which broke the record at the time for the most-viewed Netflix film ever for its first week, and became the first major Hollywood film to skip theatrical release over streaming platform for simultaneous viewing by more than 100 million people worldwide.

In 2022, Will Smith became the fifth black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, after Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, and Forest Whitaker.

On March 26,2025, Will Smith attended a ceremony where his name was added to red stripes at the bottom of street signs along a block of 59th Street in west Philadelphia.