People in the News: Will Smith
In 2006 Will Smith starred in the hit movie The Pursuit of Happyness, which tells the heartwarming, real-life story of Christopher Gardner. In the 1980s Gardner went from being a destitute African American father living on the streets with his son to a millionaire stockbroker. In one of the film's key scenes, Gardner's ability to manipulate a Rubik's Cube impresses a rich businessman so much that he gives Gardner the opportunity he needs to become successful. Getting all the colors of one of the confounding cubes to align correctly by continually shifting their sliding pieces is extremely difficult. Many people never try to solve the puzzle because they fear they cannot do it. Fear of failure, however, has never held Smith back from attempting anything he wanted to do. No matter how hard or challenging the task that Smith sets for himself, he has always believed "I can do it."
That strong self-confidence has helped Smith become one of the world's best-known, most highly acclaimed, and wealthiest entertainers. Although most people are lucky to become a rapper, television actor, or movie star, Smith has succeeded in all three types of entertainment. Smith first found fame and fortune as a rapper while still in high school. Although he knew he could continue making money by writing and singing songs, Smith challenged himself by trying to prove he could act, first in television and then in movies. Smith was so talented and hardworking that he was able to succeed as an actor as well as a singer. He has even made the rare transition from performing to producing. Smith started his own company to create record albums, television shows, and films that feature himself and other entertainers.
Will was the second of four children; he has an older sister, Pam, and a younger brother and sister, Ellen and Harry, who are twins. Will was named after his father, a U.S. Air Force veteran who owned a business that installed and repaired refrigeration units in grocery stores. His mother, Caroline, was a school administrator who worked for the Philadelphia School Board. When an interviewer once asked Smith who his idols were, he said the only people he had ever idolized were his parents. That was because his mother and father had loved him and taught him the most important lessons of his life.
The Smiths were not rich, but they had enough money to enroll Will and his siblings in Our Lady of Lourdes, a private school. Even though the family was Baptist, Will's mother wanted her children to attend the Roman Catholic school because it was the best one in the area. She did that because she believed deeply that they needed a good education to succeed in life.
Will attended Our Lady of Lourdes from kindergarten through eighth grade. He was a solid student and brought home B grades. Years later, as an adult, Smith admitted he should have gotten A's. The reason Will did not do better is because he spent too much time making jokes and goofing around with his friends. "I was the fun one who had trouble paying attention," Smith once told an interviewer. The reality was that Will was so smart that he did not have to work hard to get decent grades.
His mother's choice of schools also proved invaluable in teaching the young boy how to socialize with white people. Until Will started school, most of the people he had come into contact with were black because he lived in an African American neighborhood. But almost all of Will's classmates and teachers at the Catholic school were white. Will encountered some racism from fellow students, and a Catholic nun who taught in the school once called him a "nigger." Although other whites had already used that racial slur for African Americans to hurt the young boy, he was surprised a teacher would use the hateful word. For the most part, however, the whites Will encountered were friendly, and he learned how to get along with them.
When Will transferred to public Overbrook High School in the ninth grade, the racial balance switched again because the students were almost all African American. Smith once said that he learned important lessons by attending schools with both blacks and whites: "For my first nine years, I went to school with all white people. And then I went to school with all black people. So I have a really good sense of the bridge -- the racial bridge."
The year 1992 was a banner one for Will Smith. He was personally happy after getting married and becoming a father, and professionally he was successful as both an actor and a rapper. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) named Smith and Jeffrey Townes as the year's Outstanding Rap Artists and also chose The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as television's best comedy. Smith says he was able to succeed in two forms of entertainment at the same time by following some advice his dad had given him: "What my father always made very clear to me is just do one thing well, just make sure you can focus. If you do one thing well, everything else will come from that." Smith was able to become a star in two different entertainment areas because he was able to focus on a single task and work hard to accomplish it, whether it was writing and singing a song one day or acting on another.
But even while Smith was becoming a star in rap and television, he was drawn to yet a third form of entertainment. Like almost everyone, Smith had grown up loving the movies. There is something magical about sitting in a darkened theater and watching a film that is so exciting, funny, or scary that it can make a person sit on the edge of his or her seat in anticipation of the next scene. Smith's desire to act in movies came from being awed by how powerfully films affect the people who watch them. He explained once how a film he saw in 1977, when he was nine years old, totally captivated him:
Sitting in the movie theater watching Star Wars, I've never had an experience with any form of entertainment that was like that. It was almost spiritual. I couldn't believe that someone's mind created that. [It] felt like [director] George Lucas had a piano that was playing my emotions, and he could go ahead and do whatever he wanted.
Smith wanted to act in movies so he could have that same effect on other people. His growing celebrity enabled him to begin landing roles in movies even though he had no experience in that entertainment medium, which was more powerful and glamorous than the two in which he was already a star.
His first film was Where the Day Takes You, a movie about homeless teenagers in Los Angeles. Smith's first role was a far cry from the heroic characters he would later portray. He played Manny, a wheelchair-bound youth who is beaten up and thrown out of his wheelchair. Smith was able to make the film during the summer of 1991, after the first season of his television show ended.
The next summer Smith got a part in Made in America, a movie about race relations that starred Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson. Smith played Tea Cake Walters, the hip boyfriend of actress Nia Long, who played Goldberg's daughter. The film was more prominent than his first one because of its two stars and its controversial topic -- the relationship between a white man (Danson)and a black woman (Goldberg) who have a mixed-race daughter. Although the film received mixed reviews, Smith was critically praised for the easy charm and humor he displayed onscreen. It was also the first movie that Smith appeared in that earned more than $100 million.
Smith had worked hard to learn how to become a rapper and a television actor, and he applied that same work ethic to becoming a movie actor. He realized right away that he had to act a new way in films than he did on television. "Everything in movies," Smith says, "is just a touch smaller, a touch slower, because the camera does more of the work." That is because the movie screen is so big and there are so many close-up shots that actors do not have to use the broad movements and facial expressions they do on television. His quick intelligence and willingness to learn helped him master this new type of acting.
Made in America was released in 1993. Smith also appeared in a second film that came out that year, and it was one of the most important movies he would ever make.
Along with Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington, Smith is one of only a few African Americans to become top level Hollywood stars. For most of the twentieth century, racism relegated black actors to bit parts or roles that represented demeaning racial stereotypes. Smith has not only become a superstar in movies but also has been accepted as a heroic figure capable of saving the entire world. Dawn Taubin is a former executive with Warner Bros., which released I Am Legend. Taubin says that people do not care that Smith is black: "You'd be hard-pressed to find anybody with this kind of appeal. He transcends race, gender and age."
Despite his widespread acceptance by white audiences in his rap, television, and movie careers, Smith knows that some people hate blacks. He first commented on how strange it seemed to him that whites could love a young black rapper after his early triumph in television. Smith says, "I meet people every day [to whom] I would just be another nigger if I didn't have a TV show. It's like, Well, I wouldn't let just any black guy into my house. But Will Smith, he's okay, he's a good black guy.' That's just something you learn to deal with."
Smith's success has made him a role model for other African Americans. Although Smith enjoys that status, he has admitted that at times being a black icon can be a burden: It's uncomfortable sometimes because there are so few [black stars] in comparison to successful Caucasian actors. So few that every move you make is "a step for your people." It's like "Wow, that's a bit too much." My only litmus test is "Will my mother be embarrassed by the work I do?" As long as Mom and my family aren't embarrassed, then it generally works out for my people also.
Despite his overwhelming success, Smith keeps striving to reach his goal of being the world's most successful and famous movie star. Smith has candidly admitted his race could stand in the way of doing that. But while promoting Hancock, he said he ignores that possible handicap because it could weaken him mentally: "If I say, 'I'm black, so I can never be the biggest movie star in the world, a black person could never be the biggest movie star in the world,' I wouldn't try to be the biggest movie star in the world. I'd be creating a barrier for myself. It rarely crosses my mind -- purposely."
Perhaps what makes nearly everyone like Smith is the joy of living that he radiates in the characters he portrays as well as in his own life. Smith has admitted that playing the depressed, negative superhero Hancock was difficult because it is the exact opposite of his own personality. This is how Smith explained his basic psychological mood to one interviewer: "I wake up every morning based on hope and positive energy, [believing] today is going to be better than yesterday. I feel like my energy is viral. I'm looking to infect people with the positivity that I feel in my heart."
That positive attitude is not quite a superpower, but it has enabled him to become rich, famous, and adored by many people.