Koren, Jada Actress and talk show host Pinkett Smith. Adrienne Banfield-Jones and Robsol Pinkett, Jr. welcomed Pinkett into the world on September 18, 1971 in Baltimore, Maryland. Pinkett’s mother gave daughter the name Jada Rowland in honor of her favorite soap opera actress. Pinkett was reared by her mother and her grandmother, Marion Martin Banfield, when her parents split when she was a little child. In Baltimore, Maryland, Pinkett attended the Baltimore School of the Arts. Tupac “2 Pac” Shakur, a fellow student and future hip-hop icon, became her buddy while she was there.
After completing high school in 1989, Pinkett enrolled at Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s North Carolina School of the Arts for a year before leaving. She made her acting debut in 1990 on the television programs True Colors, Doogie Howser, M.D., and 21 Jump Street. She was cast as Lena James, a college freshmen in Bill Cosby’s TV series A Different World, in 1991. Pinkett stayed with the program until its cancellation in 1993.
Menace II Society (1993), Jason’s Lyric (1994), Low Down Dirty Shame (1994), Set It Off (1996), Scream 2 (1997), Bamboolzed (2000), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions are only a few of the movies in which Pinkett appeared as an actor (2003). As Christina Hawthorne, Pinkett created and starred in her own television series, Hawthorne, in 2009. She won the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series for her work on the program, which ran for three seasons before being cancelled in 2011.
From 2014 to 2017, Pinkett played Fish Mooney in the Fox television series Gotham. In 2018, she and her daughter Willow Smith and her mother Adrienne started hosting a conversation show on Facebook Watch called Red Table Talk. She conducted interviews with a variety of famous people there, including Gabrielle Union, Tiffany Haddish, and her 1997 husband, Will Smith. In 2021, the program received a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Informative Talk Show.
In addition, Pinkett had a brief musical career as the lead singer of the 2002-formed Heavy Metal band Wicked Wisdom. Rio Lawrence, Korel Tunador, Pocket Honore, Camron “Wirm” Graves, Philip “Fish” Fisher, and Devin Vasquez were all members of the group. My Story (2004) and Wicked Wisdom (2006) were the group’s only two studio albums, however neither was particularly successful commercially.
The 94th Academy Awards, which were hosted by comedian Chris Rock, included Pinkett’s most contentious moment when he made a joke about her shaved head, which was a result of a condition known as alopecia areata. This occurred on March 27, 2022. Will Smith entered the stage after the joke and smacked Chris Rock, claiming he was protecting his wife’s dignity. Smith was given a ten-year ban from participating in upcoming Academy Awards events as a result of this assault, which was seen by millions of people across the world.
Jada Pinkett’s career continues as of 2022. Pinkett and Will Smith, now married 25 years, have two children, Jaden Smith (Born 1998) and Willow Smith (Born 2000).