Willis, known primarily for his action hero roles, ended his career last March due to aphasia, a disease that affects the ability to speak and understand speech. The actor’s family announced today that his condition has since deteriorated.
“As painful as it is, it’s a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis in hand. Frontotemporal dementia is a cruel disease that many of us have heard of, and it can affect anyone. There is no cure for it today. This is a reality that we hope will change in the coming years,” the family said in a statement.
The statement was posted by the family on the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD) website and is signed by Willis’ wife Emma, ex-wife and actress Demi Moore and the actor’s five children.
On its website, AFTD describes frontotemporal dementia as a type of dementia that is the most common type of dementia in people under the age of 60. “While the term ‘dementia’ is most often associated with memory loss, frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is different: it is much more likely to affect personality, behavior, language, and movement, precisely because of the parts of the brain it affects: the frontal and temporal lobes,” the website says AFTD.
People diagnosed with this type of dementia have an average life expectancy of seven to 13 years, according to the association. In the United States, FTD affects between 50,000 and 60,000 people and accounts for about ten percent of all dementia cases.
Willis’ probably best-known acting work is the series of action films Deathtrap (first part 1988). Willis in the iconic first part as John McClane in a skyscraper full of terrorists is not the usual invulnerable superman, but a beaten and bleeding guy who is sometimes afraid.
In 1999, Willis surprised critics with the role of child psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe in the mysterious The Sixth Sense. However, he did not get a similar role and directors, whether Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction (1994), Terry Gilliam in the science fiction 12 Monkeys (1995), Luc Besson in The Fifth Element (1997) or Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller in Sin City (2005), they assigned it mainly to the well-known rough type.
At the end of his career, Willis also became known as the protagonist of low-budget films, due to which the organizers of the Golden Raspberry Award, awarded for the worst film achievements of the year, created a special category just for him.
