WHEN Will Smith announced this week he and wife Jada had undergone marriage counselling it was a big step — the first time the couple have admitted to doing anything normal.

The pair have spent years boasting that their life together was all about being different — about treating each other as free spirits, refusing to follow tradition and never punishing their children.

Any chance they got they dished out advice about how their untraditional methods had given them the perfect family life.

But yesterday, ahead of the Hollywood power couple’s 20th wedding anniversary next year, The Sun told how Will has admitted the pair sought help as their marriage hit breaking point.

And a source said yesterday: “Their marriage has been on life support for a long time.

“They’re exhausted from trying to maintain the facade of a happy union.”

Meanwhile the couple’s trendy parenting methods may also have backfired as their children, Jaden, 18, and Willow, 15, have faced ridicule for their nuclear-grade cockiness.

Tellingly, when asked about their bomb-proof self-confidence, Will nervously joked about his parenting style saying: “Yeah, I think it may have been a mistake. I think we might have gone too far.”

Could the wheels be finally coming off the Smith family bandwagon?

Some might argue the pair – jointly worth $240 million (184 million pounds) – laid the foundations for failure from the start.

Back in 2005 Will, who is now 47, raised eyebrows when he revealed: “Our perspective is that you don’t avoid what’s natural. You’re going to be attracted to people. In our marriage vows, we didn’t say ‘forsaking all others.’

“The vow that we made was that you will never hear that I did something after the fact. If it came down to it, then one can say to the other, ‘Look, I need to have it with somebody. I’m not going to if you don’t approve of it – but please approve of it.”

It is not surprising, then, that the couple have long been dogged by rumours they enjoy an open marriage.

Convoluted denials from Jada, 44, further muddied the waters.

She said: “I’ve always told Will, ‘You can do whatever you want as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror and be OK. And at the end of the day, right, I’m not here to be anybody’s watcher. I’m not his watcher. He’s a grown man.”

If it came down to it, then one can say to the other, ‘Look, I need to have it with somebody. I’m not going to if you don’t approve of it – but please approve of it.‘

Will Smith on marriage

In 2013 the Matrix actress penned a lengthy Facebook post setting out her manifesto for marriage in which she claimed: “Do we believe loving someone means owning them? What of unconditional love? Or does love look like, feel like, and operate as enslavement?

“Will and I BOTH can do WHATEVER we want, because we TRUST each other to do so. This does NOT mean we have an open relationship…this means we have a GROWN one.”

Jada has even claimed her husband fancying other women has actually helped the marriage, saying: “Just because a man is attracted to another woman does not mean that he does not love you.

“And it doesn’t mean that he’s going to act on it.

“If your man isn’t going to see another woman’s beauty, how the heck is he going to see yours?”

Strange logic, but par for the course on Planet Smith.

In 2013 speculation was rife that Will had cheated with actress Margot Robbie, 26, when they made movie Focus together in Australia.

Robbie strongly denied the rumours but Jada added fuel to the fire when she bragged at the premiere that she’d enjoyed watching the pair’s  scenes.

She said: “It’s nice voyeuristic way to see your man, but I am kind of weird in that way.”

Meanwhile in 2011 there were rumours of a fling between Jada and Jennifer Lopez’s then husband Marc Anthony, 47, when they starred together in a US medical drama.

It was even suggested their illicit liaison contributed to the breakdown of the Latin singer’s marriage to J-Lo.

Then earlier this year Jada was accused of secretly being lesbian by US transgender actress and activist Alexis Arquette in a Facebook rant that was later deleted.

Arquette, sister of actress Patricia, also made outlandish claims about Will’s sexuality.

Will in the past has also taken to the site in order to talk about his marriage — to quash rumours of a split last year.

He wrote: ‘So, in the interest of redundant, repetitious, over & over-again-ness… Jada and I are… NOT GETTING A DIVORCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The pair’s most significant joint project has been their determination to raise their children – who they named after themselves via gender reversal with Jaden the boy and Willow the girl – as free-spirited ‘artists.’

Some might say that instead they have created nuclear-grade narcissists.

Will even put his own career on the back-burner for several years whilst he masterminded theirs.

Both started acting, albeit in their dad’s movies, aged seven and eight, and both have released music – much of which has sunk without a trace.

In 2010 Will produced a remake of The Karate Kid as a vehicle for his son and wrote and starred alongside him in After Earth, a widely panned sci-fi turkey.

Jaden’s latest role is in new Baz Luhrmann directed Netflix series The Get Down about the origins of hip-hop, which premiered last week.

With roles landing in his lap, it is little wonder Jaden has developed a sense of self-importance. He once vowed to “imprint myself on everything in this world.”

And so unshakable is his sister’s self-belief that in an interview at 14, when asked what she had been reading recently, she replied: “Quantum physics.”

She added: “There are no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it’s the best thing.”

Willow also said that the themes of the siblings’ work so far had been “the feeling of being like, this is a fragment of a holographic reality that a higher consciousness made.”

Willow claims the most important theme of her work is “the feeling of being like, this is a fragment of a holographic reality that a higher consciousness made.”

Meanwhile, Jaden, then 16, said he preferred to think of his own themes as “the melancholiness of the ocean, the melancholiness of everything else.”

The home-schooled pair have equal contempt for traditional education with Jaden tweeting: ‘If everyone dropped out of school we would have a much more intelligent society.’

Will once said: “We generally don’t believe in punishment. From the time Jaden was five or six we would sit him down, and all he has to do is be able to explain why what he did was the right thing for his life.”

So when Willow decided on a whim to shave her head bald at the age of 12, Will recalled: “The rule in our house is that you can do anything you want and we don’t pull the parent card until danger is involved.

“But she didn’t cut my hair, she cut her own hair. It grows back.”

Will might secretly wish he had taken a few parenting pointers from his own parents.

The star’s dad Willard C Smith, an air force veteran who owned a refrigeration installation company and his mother Caroline, a school administrator, adhered to more old-fashioned methods.

The actor said: “I was brought up with, ‘You don’t even talk to your parents what your opinion is, you are not allowed to have an opinion. When you pay some bills, then you can have an opinion.’”

Given that the Smith family seem to enjoy existing largely within their own orbit, it is little wonder they live on a 150-acre compound in the mountains above Malibu, California. It is so big the front door was salvaged from a fort in India.

It includes a meditation room and a gazebo in the middle of a lake which is Will’s favourite hangout. He explained: “Answers come to me out there.”

Will, Jada and family now live in a secluded house in Malibuy, California, with relaxation spots where “answers” to Will’s big questions simply come to him

Will claims ‘answers’ come to him.

Given the way in which his family’s eccentric lifestyle has played out, the star no doubt has plenty of questions too.