Will Smith’s relationship with his parents has been a complex one, about which the actor has confessed in a memoir.
People Magazine provided an excerpt from the book “Will”, which will be released on November 9. In it, Will recounts painful family experiences, including a traumatic childhood incident. Smith tells of the complicated relationship he had with his father, William Carroll Smith Sr.
“My father was violent, but he was also in every game, role, and recital. He was an alcoholic, but he was sober in every premiere of every movie of mine,” he writes. “He listened to every album. He visited every studio. “The same person who terrorized his family put food on the table every night of my life.”
Smith writes that a horrific act of violence by the father against the actor’s mother, Caroline Bright, changed his life forever.
“When I was nine years old, I saw my father hit my mother on the side of the head so hard that she fell. I saw her spitting blood. That moment in that bedroom, perhaps more than any other moment in my life has determined who am.”
For the actor, the trauma of that moment would affect his entire life and career.
“For everything, I have done since then – awards and ratings, the spotlight, the characters, and the laughter – there have been long moments where I apologized to my mother for my inaction that day. For the fact that I failed to oppose my father. the fact that I was a coward. “
Smith’s parents separated when he was a teenager and divorced in 2000. Despite maintaining a close relationship with his father, the actor writes that the anger stemming from that childhood incident reappeared decades later as he cared for Will Sr., who had cancer.
“One night, as I was moving him in a wheelchair from his bedroom to the bathroom, something dark arose inside me. The corridor between the two rooms runs to the top of the stairs. When I was a child, I always told myself that one day I would “I took revenge on my mother. When I was an adult when I was strong enough when I was no longer a coward.”
At that moment, Smith remembers that he had intended to kill his father.
“I stopped at the top of the stairs. I could push him down and throw him away peacefully. As decades of pain, anger and resentment lingered behind me, I shook my head and turned the wheelchair toward the bathroom.”
Pasi Will Sr. passed away in 2016, Smith reflected on their troubled relationship.
“There is nothing you can get from the material world that will bring peace or inner fulfillment. In the end, it does not matter how well [people] have loved you – you will only earn a ‘smile’ based on how well you loved them. “