On December 1, the memoirs of Will Smith are published in Spain, in which the American actor, producer and musician, who became the highest-grossing star in Hollywood, evokes a childhood marked by the violence exerted by his father.
"When I was 9 years old, I saw my father punch my mother in the temple so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood. That moment, in that bedroom, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am now.", writes the protagonist of "I’m legend" or "Men in black".
"Everything I have achieved since then -he continues-, the awards and recognitions, the spotlights and the media attention, the characters and the laughter, have been marked by a subtle reiterated desire to apologize to my mother for my inaction that day".
At one point in the book, edited by Zenith and written with the help of Mark Manson (author of "The subtle art of giving a shit about almost everything"), Smith confesses that he came to think of killing his father when he was very old, sick and dependent.
"I stopped at the stairs. I could have pushed him down the stairs, no one would have suspected a thing", writes. "Decades of hurt, anger and resentment came and went. I shook my head and kept pushing my father to the bathroom.".
Born in 1968, Will Smith went from being a middle-class kid raised in West Philadelphia to becoming a rap star first, television later ("The prince of Bel Air", 1990-1996) and finally the most commercial and successful cinema.
"Will" it is presented as the story of a person who manages to take control of his emotions and encourages the reader to do the same. In them the actor tells how, despite feeling that he had won the lottery of life, his family did not see him that way and they felt like "guest artists" in the circus of his life.
Of his principles as a rapper, he points out that he received a lot of criticism for being middle class and not "a pimp who dealt with drugs".
"I went to a Catholic school with a majority of white children up to the age of fourteen, my mother had a university education and my father, despite all his defects, always brought food to the table and would have preferred to die rather than abandon his children", remember.
However, once he made his first million dollars in his early twenties, he did begin to surround himself with drug traffickers, he says, and to squander uncontrollably.
In a recent interview at the Savoy Theater in London with fellow actor Idris Elba to discuss his memoirs, Smith revealed that at that time a fine from the Treasury fell that left him bankrupt for not paying taxes and that he had to sell all his properties and borrow $ 10,000 from a dealer friend to move to Los Angeles and start his acting career.
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