Will Smith: “My life marked by violence against my mother”

A violent father “that I wanted to kill”, a constant sense of guilt disguised as perfectionism, the suffering of his mother that he could not avoid, his mistakes with his children, an extramarital love for a colleague who overwhelmed him when the his first child was on the way. The memoir that is a real cascade of painful revelations Will Smith is going to be released in the bookstore with the simple title Will.

In the autobiography, of which the weekly People anticipates some excerpts, the 53-year-old singer-actor retraces the most salient episodes of his life, indicating those that most marked him in the different phases of his existence. Starting with that episode of domestic violence that he witnessed when he was still just a child.

“I was nine when I saw my father hit my mother in the head so hard that she lost consciousness,” he writes in the chapter dedicated to his childhood. “The moment I saw her bleed, in that bedroom, was probably what, more than any other in my life, defined who I am today.“. Since then, the actor says, a strong sense of guilt has accompanied him and constantly accompanies him: “Everything I’ve done in my life – every success, every award, every recognition, every laugh – has been for me a way to apologize for that day, for not opposing him and for disappointing her. My success was my way of forgiving myself for being a coward and all my characters were a way of hiding that coward from the world.».

This constant sense of guilt, says the actor, has also led him to be extremely perfectionist, a trait that he recognizes, however, that he inherited from that much feared alcoholic father: “My father was violent and alcoholic, but he was always there. He came to every premiere of every film of mine and always came sober. He listened to every album and visited every recording studio. He was a perfectionist. That same intense perfectionism that terrified his family has fed me every day of my life. “

William Carroll Smith Sr and Caroline Bright split when the star of MiB was a teenager, but also as an adult, despite never having broken off relations with his father, the actor was unable to overcome the trauma of violence he witnessed as a child, enough to even think of an extreme gesture. It happened when the now elderly man fell ill (he passed away in 2016): “One night, I was accompanying him to the bathroom in his wheelchair and I stopped in front of the flight of stairs that crossed the route between his room and toilet. At that moment I remembered the promise I made to myself as a child: that one day I would avenge my mother. And I had an instinct to drop him down the stairs. It was enough to slide it down and it would end there, without consequences. Who would have thought that I did it on purpose? ” the actor confesses in the memoir: years of pain, anger, resentment that had settled and hidden, had suddenly re-emerged all together. “Fortunately, it was only a moment, when they returned to the abyss, I shook myself and went on to the bathroom in silence.”