Will Smith Born: From Fresh Prince to Hollywood
Will Smith was seventeen when DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince released their debut album. He was nineteen when they won the first-ever Grammy for rap. He spent the money badly, owed the IRS a million dollars by age twenty-one, and took the role of a fictionalized version of himself in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air largely to dig out of debt. The show ran six seasons. Then came Bad Boys, Independence Day, Men in Black, Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness. By the early 2000s, he was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. He started as a teenager with a boom box in West Philadelphia.
September 25, 1968
58 years ago
What Else Happened on September 25
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