Will Smith Born: From Fresh Prince to Hollywood

Willard Carroll Smith II was born in Philadelphia on September 25, 1968, and grew up in Wynnefield, a middle-class neighborhood in West Philadelphia. He was seventeen when he and his friend Jeff Townes, known as DJ Jazzy Jeff, released their debut album as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. They won the first Grammy Award ever given for a rap performance in 1989, a distinction that was overshadowed by controversy when several prominent rap artists boycotted the ceremony because the award was not televised. Smith spent his early winnings recklessly and owed the Internal Revenue Service roughly one million dollars by the age of twenty-one. The NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which began in 1990, was as much a financial lifeline as a creative opportunity: he took the role partly to work off his tax debt. The show ran for six seasons and established him as a television star with crossover appeal. His transition to film in the mid-1990s was one of the most successful in entertainment history: Bad Boys, Independence Day, and Men in Black arrived in consecutive years, and by 1998 he was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. His ability to combine physical comedy, dramatic range, and genuine charisma in mainstream blockbusters made him one of the most bankable stars of his generation. Ali, in which he played Muhammad Ali, earned him his first Academy Award nomination. The Pursuit of Happyness earned him a second. He started his career as a teenager with a boom box in West Philadelphia and turned it into one of the most commercially successful entertainment careers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.