I thought about killing my father to ‘avenge’ my mother – Will Smith

Actor Will Smith has revealed that he once thought about killing his father to “avenge” his mother for the abuse she suffered.

Smith revealed this in his new memoir “Me”. In excerpts which were published on People, the actor revealed the fraught setting of his early life in Philadelphia with his father, Willard Carroll Smith Sr., and mother Caroline Bright, and how it affected his later life with his father, whom he cared for while he was battling cancer.

53-year-old Smith wrote; 

“My father was violent, but he was also at every game, play, and recital.

“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.

“When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of the head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood.” 

The actor’s parents eventually split when he was a teen and got divorced in 2000. Recounting how he contemplated ending his father’s life, Smith wrote; 

“One night, as I delicately wheeled him from his bedroom toward the bathroom, a darkness arose within me. The path between the two rooms goes past the top of the stairs. As a child I’d always told myself that I would one day avenge my mother.

“I paused at the top of the stairs. I could shove him down, and easily get away with it. As the decades of pain, anger, and resentment coursed then receded, I shook my head and proceeded to wheel Daddio to the bathroom.”

Smith’s father died in 2016. Reflecting on his decades of success as an entertainer and his relationship with his father, the actor wrote; 

 “There is nothing that you can receive from the material world that will create inner peace or fulfillment.

“In the end, it will not matter one single bit how well [people] loved you — you will only gain ‘the Smile’ based on how well you loved them.”