Will Smith Celebrates His 'Mom-Mom' Caroline's 87th Birthday: 'Nothing Like Laughing with Your Mother'

Caroline Bright is mom to Smith and his three siblings: Pamela, Harry and Ellen

Will Smith is wishing his mother Caroline Bright a happy birthday!

On Wednesday, Will, 55, shared a throwback photo of himself laughing with Caroline, now 87, as they sit on a couch together.

"Happy Bday, Mom-Mom! 87 today," the actor captioned his Instagram post. "There’s nothing like laughing with your Mother. ❤️"

Caroline, who worked as a Philadelphia school board member, is mom to Will and his three siblings, older sister Pamela and younger siblings Harry and Ellen, who are twins. She was married to Will's father, Willard Carroll Smith Sr., until they separated during Will's teenage years and legally divorced in 2000. Willard Sr., whom Will had a turbulent relationship with, died in 2016.

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Smith has made a point of sharing tributes to Caroline, whom he affectionally calls "Mom-Mom,' on Instagram in recent years. In 2022, he shared a sweet video of the pair dancing together to Whitney Houston's classic song "I Wanna Dance with Somebody."

"85 Today! Happy Bday, Mom-Mom," he wrote in a caption at the time. The video showed him and Caroline as they held hands while singing the chorus of the Grammy-winning song together. In the video, the mother-son duo can be seen swaying and snapping their fingers before Bright put together a smooth spin to complete the special moment.

"Let’s dance our way to 100," Will added in his caption at the time.

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The King Richard actor wrote extensively about his parents' relationship and how it affected his childhood in his 2021 memoir, Will. In the book, he said that when he was 9 years old, he saw his father punch Caroline "in the side of the head so hard that she collapsed," and he wrote that the experience permanently affected how he views his life and career.

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"Within everything that I have done since then — the awards and accolades, the spotlights and attention, the characters and the laughs — there has been a subtle string of apologies to my mother for my inaction that day," he wrote in the book. "For failing her in the moment. For failing to stand up to my father."

Elsewhere in the book, he shared that he covered an unpaid $140,000 Willard Sr. owed Caroline in child support upon their 2000 divorce. Will wrote that Caroline eventually gave him the money back upon learning that he paid the debt, joking that she was “the first person in the history of Pennsylvania to pay her own child back the back child support that they had paid for themselves.”

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