It's Will's world

Will Smith ought to be relaxing. After all, he's here in Hawaii to play in a procelebrity golf tournament (just one of the perks of superstardom), but even with dolphins splashing around in the lagoon behind him, Hollywood's premier PR dynamo can't switch off. The 36-year-old actor, singer and stand-up has a new movie to hustle, so the international press has been flown over en masse to hear him hold forth about

In Hollywood, black actors have plenty of opportunities in the fields of action, crime and urban musical. But romantic comedy is a genre in which the studios still seem to shut them out. And yet here's Will's kiss'n'hoot debut making an unprecedented $45.3 million in its opening Valentine's weekend at the US box office, the biggest numbers for a romantic comedy ever. 'In the world!' Smith hollers, 'In the universe!' Another of Hollywood's racial rules bites the dust, a fact that might account for Smith's almost permanent spasm of a grin.

'Now, not all my films open at number one,' the former Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air says, oversized diamond studs glinting in his ears. 'Let me think...' (even Smith's parody of false modesty is funny. It has been years since one of his films failed to hit the top spot). But Hitch is much more than just another chart-topper. Romantic comedies have been the segregated domain of the big white-bread stars. Its king is Tom Hanks, its queen Julia Roberts. When Smith noticed he wasn't being sent the same sort of upscale, sophisticated scripts he remembered that he'd been told he couldn't play Muhammad Ali, either, and that African-Americans didn't battle aliens (Independence Day) or ride the frontier (Wild, Wild West).

In the film, Smith plays 'date doctor' Alex 'Hitch' Hitchens, who dispenses advice to lovelorn men on how to snare the seemingly unattainable objects of their affections, eventually falling for the gossip columnist (Cuban-American sex bomb Eva Mendes) who initially sees him as nothing more than a hot scoop. All quite predictable, really, but the presence of two sexy ethnic leads certainly adds a twist to this conventional formula. 'It's not that I avoided romantic comedies,' Smith explains, suddenly serious. 'It's that they weren't being offered. Star Wars was the film that made me want to make movies, so in the beginning I wanted to make films like Independence Day and Men In Black, which would have the same impact on kids as Star Wars had on me.'

Endearingly, he credits his then threeyearold son Jaden (his first child with second wife Jada Pinkett Smith) with inspiring him to move in a new direction. 'After I-Robot, he said, "Daddy, that's really good but you don't need to save the world no more." So then I made Shark Tale and Hitch. I just needed a little bit of a departure, to mix it up. I've been studying Cary Grant a lot lately. I love his style.'

But Hitch didn't happen simply because of his toddler son's advice. The star has planned his career like a military campaign from the morning he woke up and said to himself, 'I want to be the biggest movie star in the world.' In the early Nineties, Smith was 'merely' a rap artist and sitcom star and soon discovered that he was being pigeonholed. He could 'turn legit' in the Broadway-to-celluloid transfer Six Degrees Of Separation but beyond that he would have to prove himself time and again at the box office, even as Denzel Washington stepped into the roles Smith would have loved.

Still, he insists he has no regrets. 'I do very few things without research. At the time, nine of the top 10 films of all time were special effects films with creatures. Eight out of 10 had love stories in them. Black actors don't translate internationally. I knew if I wanted to make it internationally, I'd better make the special effects films with creatures in them, and a love story. You've got to study the patterns.' The shrug is eloquent. 'That's the chess player in me.' Men In Black and Independence Daywent on to make more than $1 billion around the world.

Last summer's I-Robot saw Smith playing down his rambunctious onscreen alter-ego for an altogether more adult sci-fi incarnation. Audiences lapped it up. Smith seems unable to put a foot wrong. Unless you count the recent, inexplicable news story which had him supposedly telling the world Jada had told him he could cheat as long as she knew about it. Besides, Smith has weathered worse.

The second of four kids born to an air force sergeant turned electrician, Will Smith Sr, and his wife Caroline in Philadelphia, the family were middle-class and well-educated. In his teenage years, by all accounts, Will was a geek - a million miles from the streetwise hip-hop dude he was to become. Smith laughs. 'Yeah, I always wanted to be a scientist. I loved dinosaurs. From the age of about 10 to 15, that's all I wanted to be. That was where I was heading but then I chose rap instead.'

Nicknamed 'Prince' as a kid for his uncanny ability to escape punishment for almost any form of mischief, Smith tagged himself 'The Fresh Prince' and formed a rap duo alongside DJ Jazzy Jeff. They were an instant hit. Smith moved to Beverly Hills and snapped up the house, the car, the trappings and the girls.

At 21, Smith and Jazzy Jeff won the first of three Grammy awards on their way to shifting more than 10 million records. By 22, he was the star of TV sitcom The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. The feel-good show lasted six years, an eternity in American TV terms, and was a great showcase for his magnetic screen persona. As he ended up producing and directing it, too, one assumes it must have finally taught him to be tough.