Tallulah Willis Opens Up About Delayed Recognition of Father Bruce Willis’ Frontotemporal Dementia

Tallulah, daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, admits that she has long denied her father’s illness, made known by the actor’s family in early 2023. Tallulah said she had unconsciously activated a self-defense mechanism that did not allow her to immediately understand how serious the parent’s health condition. As you know, William suffers from frontal dementiaan illness that forced him to retire from the stage.

The Tale of Tallulah Willis

“My family announced in early 2022 that Bruce Willis suffered from aphasia, a brain-mediated inability to speak or understand language. Then, earlier this year, we discovered that symptom was a feature of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive neurological disorder. But I knew something was wrong for a long time”, Tallulah told in an interview with Vogue:

It all began with a kind of vague indifference on my father’s part, which we in the family attributed to hearing loss. We said to ourselves, “Die Hard butchered Daddy’s ears.”

Bruce Willis’ daughter: ‘I thought he was just disinterested’

Tallulah says he even thought, at least at the beginning of his father’s illness, that Willis’s was only disinterest in the children he had from his ex-wife Demi Moore, for the benefit of those he had with his partner Emma Heming: “Subsequently that lack of response from him escalated and sometimes I took it personally. She had had two children with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought she had lost interest in me. Even though she was the furthest thing from the truth, my teenage brain tortured itself with flawed logic: I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father. I admit I lived in denial about what was happening to Bruce and I’m not proud of it”.