Willard Christopher "Will" Smith, Jr. (born September 25, 1968)[1] is an American actor, film producer and rapper. He has enjoyed success in music, television and film. Newsweek has called him the most powerful actor on the planet.[2] Smith has been nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, two Academy Awards, and has won multiple Grammy Awards.
Smith rose to fame as a rapper under the name The Fresh Prince in the late 1980s and his role in the television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. His most notable films include Bad Boys, Independence Day, Men in Black, Ali, I, Robot, The Pursuit of Happyness, I Am Legend, Hancock, and Seven Pounds. He is the only actor in history to have eight consecutive films gross over $100 million in the domestic box office as well as being the only actor to have eight consecutive films open at #1 on the domestic box office as a Lead Actor.Smith was born and raised in West Philadelphia and Germantown in Northwest Philadelphia. His mother, Caroline (née Bright), was a school administrator who worked for the Philadelphia school board, and his father, Willard Christopher Smith, Sr., was a refrigeration engineer.[4][5] He was raised Baptist.[6] His parents separated when he was thirteen and divorced when he was thirty-two.[7] Smith's charming and sly demeanor in school resulted in the nickname "Prince", which eventually turned into the "Fresh Prince". While still in his teens, Smith began rapping and eventually began collaborating with Jeff Townes (a.k.a. DJ Jazzy Jeff), whom he met at a party. He attended Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia. DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince was born with Smith handling the rhymes and Townes overseeing the mastery of mixing and scratching — the combination was a pop and hip-hop hit during the 1980s and early 1990s.
While it is widely reported that Smith turned down a scholarship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he never applied to MIT,[8] although he was admitted to a "pre-engineering program" there.[9] According to Smith, "My mother, who worked for the School Board of Philadelphia, had a friend who was the admissions officer at MIT. I had pretty high SAT scores and they needed black kids, so I probably could have gotten in. But I had no intention of going to college."[10]
