In the interview, Emma Heming Willis spoke about Bruce Willis‘ battle against dementia: A tragic circumstance obscured this for a long time.
When Hollywood star Bruce Willis’ withdrawal from the film business was announced by his family at the beginning of 2022, his fans around the world were completely shocked. The 69-year-old did not go into well-deserved retirement for reasons of age, as others like Jack Nicholson have already done, he was forced to do so because of his physical condition: Initially, his family announced that Bruce Willis suffered from aphasia, a speech disorder that caused him to There are impairments in speaking, understanding, reading and writing written and spoken.
The fact that aphasia was actually just one of many symptoms was confirmed almost a year later when his wife Emma Heming Willis made it public that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. Due to its uncharacteristic clinical picture, this form of dementia is often not recognized, while its symptoms are often confused with other psychiatric illnesses. Tallulah Willis, his daughter with actress Demi Moore, revealed to Vogue that in recent years there have been a number of signs of serious illness that they as a family simply overlooked or misinterpreted.
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But of all things, Bruce Willis’ Hollywood career with immortal masterpieces such as “Die Hard”, which you can stream on Amazon, “Death Suits Her” and “The Sixth Sense” apparently played a significant role in the fact that his illness was only discovered very late became. You have to know that Willis suffered from a stutter in his childhood. It was only through acting that he overcame this difficulty in speaking. In conversation with Town & Country His wife now revealed how this initially led her and the entire family on the wrong track:
“With Bruce [Willis] it started with language. As a child he stuttered badly. Then when he went to college, a theater teacher said to him, ‘I have something that will help you.’ In this class, Bruce realized that he could memorize a script and recite it without stuttering. That’s what got him into acting. Bruce has always stuttered, but he was good at hiding it. Then when his speech started to change, it seemed like it was just part of his stuttering, it was just Bruce. Never in a million years would it have occurred to me that it would be a form of dementia in someone so young.”
In some older videos with interviews you can actually see how the former Hollywood star stutters more and more over the years, repeats words and formulates sentences that make no sense. In addition to Bruce Willis, there are other big Hollywood names who have quietly and without much notice withdrawn from the film business, as you can see in the video:
Was Bruce Willis’ condition exploited in his last few films?
The average life expectancy for frontotemporal dementia is eight years. Those in the family’s inner circle say that Bruce Willis is no longer able to speak or read. According to Emma Heming Willis, other cognitive skills that you lose over time include the ability to make decisions. This would be consistent with allegations that filmmaker Randall Emmett, with whom Willis made a total of 21 films between 2006 and 2022, literally abused the situation. At times, one crew member said, he seemed to forget he was on a set and seemed completely helpless.
Let’s remember the better moments that Bruce Willis gave us, for example with this quiz:
Bruce Willis Quiz: Can you recognize his films from just one image?
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