Mr and Mrs Will Smith – the ultimate A list family

Before she had children she imagined that growing up the daughter of a hard-working single mother in Baltimore, one of the most dangerous cities in America, would be the hardest thing she’d ever do. “I didn’t think anything could be more difficult than that.”

But juggling being a wife and mother with work has proved even harder. “I’d wake up angry and go to bed angry. In the end, I decided things had to change. I was offered a tour with my band but Jaden was asked to film The Pursuit of Happyness. He was seven and a half. Could I really let my little boy go and do a film without me being there?” She shakes her head. “I cancelled the tour. I cancelled everything. I went to look after Jaden.”

This, of course, raises many questions. For a start, did Jaden really have to do the film? The Smith family are alternately fêted and slammed for letting their children have such public lives. The film starred his father; why didn’t he look after Jaden? In other words, why did Jada feel it was her job to give up large chunks of her career to look after her family?

‘I know what you’re saying,” she says, “but, in all honesty, it’s different being a mom to being a dad. And his dad was working and, believe me, I know what Will is like when he’s working. He’s not all there.”

More importantly, she says it was the moment that changed her. “I had to decide what was important and the answer to that was my family. It’s that simple. I want to do what makes them happy and acting makes Jaden happy. I wasn’t going to take that opportunity away from him. That’s what makes me happy. That’s what makes them happy. I gave up everything else. So what? I am happy with my decision, period.”

Well, she certainly does seem happy. When I meet her on a flying visit to London to promote her new TV series, Hawthorne, she’s got more energy than a million-watt lightbulb. In fact, she really is unlike any other celebrity I have met. She talks about everyone with abandon. Her husband is, apparently, “out there flying in the cosmos”. “He’s cut of cloth that no one else is,” she says. She talks of how she wants her children to have freedom, how hard it was for her growing up, the fact her character, chief nursing officer Christina Hawthorne, in her new series is based on her mother, who was a nurse herself… On and on she goes, happily sharing information that most people in the public eye keep tightly close to their chest.

She’s also very funny and instantly likeable. She’s a tiny ball of energy, bouncing up and down in her seat and gesticulating madly. She looks just like her daughter, Willow, with “whippy” hair (her daughter’s first foray into the music world, an infectious hit that became the bestselling debut on Billboard’s digital song chart, is called Whip My Hair). She is very small and athletic-looking. When she tells me about Hawthorne, a medical drama set in the fictitious Trinity Hospital about to be aired on Sony Entertainment Television, she gets excitable.

It’s already premiered to mixed reviews in the States, but Jada is adamant: “It’s great! I think you’re all going to love it. It’s not about the drama of the operations. It’s the human stories behind it. You never know if something is going to work but, hey, it’s been commissioned for a third season so someone out there likes it.”

Then she lifts her arms up and whirls them in the air. “Who knows!” she says, waggling her head and giggling.

No wonder she doesn’t see a difference between herself as a 39 year-old adult and her children. There probably isn’t any difference. Just a few days ago, she told a press conference she takes her style tips from Willow. “She’s so stylish,” she said. Her daughter, who apparently gets her style tips from Lady Gaga, is only 10. But Jada’s right. The fashion world love Willow. Ever since she started hijacking her parents’ red carpet appearances in ever more outlandish hair and dress creations, Willow’s fashion status has been secured. Last year she was catapulted onto the front row of Milan Fashion Week. And took her mother along too.

Doesn’t she find this all rather odd? “Not really,” she says. “Willow’s been aware of fashion and creating her own style for a long time. She’s been around it for so long, it’s part of what our family is used to.”

She’s very big on family – her and Will and the kids. I can imagine the Smith family now, all goofy voices and “You lookin’ at me?” round the table. Attitude, I imagine, abounds. “Of course it does!” she says. “Everyone in my family’s got a voice. A big loud voice and we all know how to use it.”

Her children, Jaden and Willow (a play on their parents’ names), seem to have as much attitude as she has. Willow, who is signed to Jay-Z’s label, Roc Nation, and gyrates through her next single, 21st Century Girl, singing the lyrics, “I’m A 21st century girl/I do what I want,” regularly wears leather trousers and tight jackets, plus her current favourite – neon hair extensions. It’s pretty much what Jada herself is wearing today, only teamed with hugely high-heeled boots (she is only 5ft tall).

Jaden isn’t quite so “out there”, but his starring role in box office hit The Karate Kid has made him world famous. All young children, including my own, want to be him. “That’s great!” she says warmly. “He was really good in that. He loved doing it.”

But for all their fans, there are an equal number of detractors who believe the Smith children are being thrust into the limelight too often, too early. Doesn’t it worry her that her children are so famous?

She sucks her cheeks in. “No,” she says. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about that, but they do what they want to do. They are having fun. Who am I to stop them? I mean, they have manners and all that. I have zero tolerance for rudeness, but you never know what’s going to happen in your life. It’s out of your control. I could walk out now and get run over, so I think they should do what they’re doing as long as they’re enjoying it. Also, hey, I’m there. Ain’t no one going to get anything over me.”

She is obviously at the centre of her family’s life. “Absolutely,” she says. “I am the woman. I am the mother. I am the glue, the rock, all those things. I made those choices because, I tell you, I was killing myself.” She was, she says, overloaded with her career – she was being offered roles in films and yet didn’t know whether to say yes to any of them.

‘It’s so hard,” she says. “On the one hand, I wanted a career. I’d worked so hard and yet there I was, strung out having to make decisions based on that and it was too difficult. Should I be a star? Should I be a mum? A wife? You can’t be all three, something has to give. I was trying to do everything but not doing anything very well. I was failing. I was papering over the cracks. You know what I’m saying?

“I thought I was going to die. I was so angry about everything. I’d wake up next to Will and think, ‘What are you doing here? Why are you here?’ and I’d feel angry. I felt everything was dying. But then I realised we were going round one side of the circle and we had to come out the other side. You go down one side, you come up the other side. That’s all fine and good unless you are with someone who can’t go up the other side with you and then you just gotta bail out. But marriage takes work. Real work. W-O-R-K. And both Will and I know that.”

She met Will in the early Nineties when she was in the sitcom A Different World. A couple of years before, he’d visited the set and ended up marrying a woman he met there called Sheree Zampino. They went on to have a son, Trey, to whom Jada is stepmother.

“I knew Will for quite a while before we got together,” she says. “I liked him but as a friend, nothing more than that.” Then, one day, she was sitting with him and a group of friends when she heard a voice in her head telling her he was the one. “It said, ‘That’s the man you are going to marry.’ I couldn’t believe it but…”

They married in 1997. She and Will were producers on the Tony-nominated musical Fela! and he is a ghost producer on Hawthorne. Is the key to their success as a couple, considering they both work in an industry not noted for the stability of its power marriages, the fact they work together?

‘We work together pretty good,” she says. “He flies. That’s what he does. He’s elsewhere, up in that sky. I am in the earth. I see the bad, maybe, and he sees the good, but then I realised a long time ago why we are in each other’s life. I need him to fly and he needs me to ground him.”

Do they criticise each other when it comes to work? She thinks for a bit and then nods. “It’s hard,” she says. “When I was younger, I found it very difficult to take criticism. You take everything personally, you know?” But she says she and Will have been together for so long, they know how to deal with each other. “The thing is, with a man, they only want to relate to a woman in one way. They’re in the play zone! They’re like, ‘Here we are, a man and a woman,’ but I now know how to handle that. I deal with it but I say my piece.”

I tell her I’m not sure if I follow her. “OK,” she says. “Look, there are many Jadas. There’s the little girl Jada, who wants to be looked after. Then there’s the mum Jada, whose job it is to look after her children. Then there’s executive producer Jada, who is very strong and tough. But when I’m talking to Will I need him to see I am me, Jada, his wife. I say to him, ‘Look at me, Will. I’m your wife. I’m the woman you love. Be gentle and tender and honest.’”

What keeps her awake at night? Her career? Her children? “Oh no, I’m not worried about Willow and Jaden,” she says. “They’re cool.” Isn’t she concerned that fame will go to their heads? “Look, they’re used to this. It’s what they want and they are going with it and having some fun.” But doesn’t she worry that they might lose sight of normality? “I don’t worry about that,” she says. “I know people might look at our life and think it’s all so easy for us. Yes, we’ve got money and fame and so it all looks simple, but it isn’t. Everyone faces hardships in their life and difficult decisions and my family is the same.”

Her own hardship happened early on when she was growing up in Baltimore. We all know what Baltimore is like, I tell her. We’ve watched The Wire. Is it really like that? She slowly nods. “You think you could die every day.”

Her mother, who became pregnant with Jada when she was in high school, worked all the hours she could to provide for her daughter, and Jada’s grandmother helped to bring her up. The young Jada did well at school, motivated by an overwhelming desire to succeed, and helped by her grandmother, who had a fierce sense of pride and ambition, and a mother who wanted her daughter to have the type of freedom, both mental and physical, that she herself never had.

In the end, having been academically successful, Jada had a choice between going to law school or pursuing her dream of becoming an actress. She says it was the age-old dilemma: do something responsible, money-earning, decent, upstanding and safe, or try her hand at the thing she loved but had absolutely no idea how it would pan out.

She asked her mother’s advice. Should she go to law school or head out to California and try her hand at acting? “My mum said, ‘Go to California.’ You see? I expected her to say law in a way because that was such a great option. If I did well, I would have been able to provide for everyone but Mum said, ‘No, Jada, be an actress.’ She wanted me to find my dream.” Jada looks very moved when she says this. It must have been a hard decision? She nods rapidly. “It was,” she says.

But the decision has worked out in so many ways. She is rich, admired, successful in her own right. She and Will have the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation in Baltimore, which has a well-earned reputation for helping troubled youths. “We want to put something back,” she says. “It’s a hard place to grow up. There was nothing in LA that could frighten me after Baltimore.”

It’s just the small matter of how unreservedly privileged her children seem to be that rankles. In the States, talk-show hosts high-five her when it comes to the “great job” she’s doing. In the UK, she finds she gets a much more muted reaction. “Yeah, I think some people find it over the top.” She says it does concern her that people are critical of how much public exposure her children have. “It’s my decision,” she says. “I’ve put aside my career to be with them. This journey may end. It may change into another journey. For all I know, they might end up running a surf school in Hawaii, but, right now, they’re doing what they are doing. But life is frail, isn’t it? There’s no getting away from that. It’s a challenge. Sometimes I think people are afraid to just live. My kids aren’t afraid of that and that’s great.”

What about her, then? Is she afraid of anything? “I stay positive,” she says. “But things get me down.” She tells me she had to give up her singing career. She had a metal band called Wicked Wisdom who were beginning to get a following. They even played OzzFest in 2005, which outraged hardcore fans, who thought she did not have the right credentials. “But we won them round,” she says. Why did she stop the band? She shrugs. “The fork in the road,” she says. “Family and kids, not fronting a rock band.”

But if it’s all about her husband and children, when does she get time for her?

She hoots with laughter. “Me? Hey, I get time for me when I work. I go on to the set of Hawthorne for three months of the year and it’s great. It’s like a vacation, it’s so much fun!” She has a strong set of friends in Hollywood. She and Will are close to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Does she hang out with the Hollywood set most of the time? She laughs so much, she almost falls off her seat.

“No!” she says. Her idea of a treat is to spend the day at a spa with her girlfriends. “I’m not that bothered about clothes and shopping,” she says. “But it’s fun to hang out and get your nails done. I’m just a normal girl like that.”

Hawthorne starts at 8pm on Thursday on Sony Entertainment Television Sky 157