Will Smith claims that at one point he contemplated killing his father to avenge his mother for his mistreatment. “I was an alcoholic, but I was sober at every premiere of every one of my movies.”
Will Smith reveals he contemplated murdering his father to avenge his mother
In an excerpt from his new memoir, “Me,” published in People, Smith reveals the tense atmosphere of his early life in Philadelphia with his father, Willard Carroll Smith Sr. and his mother Caroline Bright, and how it affected his later life with his father, whom he cared for while the older man battled cancer.
“My father was violent, but he was also into all the games, plays and recitals,” writes Smith, 53. “He was an alcoholic, but he was sober at every premiere of every one of my movies. He listened to every record. He visited every studio.”
He continues, “When I was nine, I saw my father hit my mother on the side of the head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood.”
The low point in the relationship between Smith and her father came when she was caring for her father near the end of his life. “One night, as I gently carried him out of his room to take him to the bathroom, a darkness came over me. As a child, I always told myself that someday I would avenge my mother.”
“I stopped at the top of the stairs, I could push him down and get away with it easily. As the decades of pain, anger and resentment passed and then receded, I shook my head and proceeded to take Daddio to the bathroom.”
Smith’s father died in 2016. Reflecting on his decades of success as an artist and his relationship with his father, Will writes, “There is nothing you can receive from the material world that will generate inner peace or satisfaction.”
“In the end, it won’t matter one iota how well people loved you; you’ll only get ‘the smile’ based on how well you loved them.”
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