Will Smith struggled to accept his daughter Willow's wish to quit music after her hit song Whip My Hair because he didn't want to let down her new label boss, JAY-Z.
The singer/actress was just 10 years old when she debuted the pop smash in 2010, earning her a record deal with rap mogul JAY-Z's Roc Nation company, but she struggled with her growing fame and soon decided to take a step back from the limelight.
Her famous father admits he was horrified that Willow had chosen to walk away from her promising career so soon after signing her contract, and he was desperate for her to change her mind.
"In the middle of all the Whip My Hair stuff, she was on tour and it was a great show, and everything was amazing," Will recalled in a new episode of Facebook series Red Table Talk, which Willow co-hosts with her mother Jada Pinkett Smith and her grandmother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones. "It was like, we were at the top of the world: Whip My Hair was played (everywhere), (we're by) JAY-Z's side, it's beautiful, and then she was like, 'OK, I'm done, Daddy!'"
"I was like, 'Sweetie, you can't be done, you made a commitment,'" he continued. "She was like, 'But, I'm finished.'
"I was like, 'I know, sweetie, but you can't be finished. You made a commitment to Mr. JAY-Z.' She said, 'No, daddy, you made a commitment to Mr. JAY-Z...'"
The Suicide Squad superstar only realised how serious Willow was about taking a break when she took a buzzer to her head.
"She came down the next day and had shaved her head bald," Will said. "I was like, 'Does she know what she's doing?'
"That was a deep protest. What it did for me, was I had a crazy realisation in that moment. I was building what I wanted for her, and she tried all the different ways to say, 'I don't want that!' I was like, 'I get it.'"
The turn of events occurred around the same time his marriage to Jada reached a breaking point, and Will knew he had to change his ways for the better to save his family relationships.
"I saw, for the first time, what Jada had been saying about hiding behind my ego, and my dreams, and my desires, and pretending like it's love," he confessed.
The couple has since rebuilt its union, celebrating its 21st wedding anniversary this year (18), while Willow, who turns 18 on Wednesday (31Oct18), has also bounced back from her pre-teen anxieties linked to her celebrity, and dropped her debut album, ARDIPITHECUS, in 2015.
