By using a smoothing function, the P* nonlinear complementarity problem (P* NCP) can be reformulated as a parameterized smooth equation. A Newton method is proposed to solve this equation. The iteration sequence generated by the proposed algorithm is bounded and this algorithm is proved to be globally convergent under an assumption that the P* NCP has a nonempty solution set. This assumption is weaker than the ones used in most existing smoothing algorithms. In particular, the solution obtained by the proposed algorithm is shown to be a maximally complementary solution of the P* NCP without any additional assumption.