Bruce Willis’s family continues to share intimate moments with the beloved actor, and to talk openly about his condition, in social media posts following his diagnosis with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). While his family have asked for privacy from the press, his children have been game to update the public periodically, usually just with fairly vague comments about how nice it is to spend time with the star on his good days. Willis retired from acting in 2022, after his family announced that he had been diagnosed with aphasia, a neurological condition that impacts language and memory, and leads to dementia.
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Willis has appeared in movies that earn hundreds of millions of dollars, and right up until his retirement, rumors persisted that he could return for another outing as John McClane, either as the main character or as the narrator in an origin story. Still, most of the top portion of Willis’s IMDb page are movies where he was able to do a few days’ work and not remember too many lines. This was apparently a result of Willis struggling with memory and communication skills as a result of the early stages of aphasia.
“He is the same, which I think in this regard I’ve learned is the best thing you can ask for. I see love when I’m with him,” Willis’s daughter Tallulah told The Drew Barrymore Show. “And it’s my dad and he loves me, which is really special.”
You can see her interview below.
After years of sparring with the media, Willis became something of a gossip-column darling in the last decade or so, owing to the heartwarming way he and ex-wife Demi Moore (and their new spouses) have maintained and grown their relationships. That has likely shaped some of the coverage of his diagnosis.
“On one hand it’s who we are as a family, but also, it’s really important for us to spread awareness about FTD,” Willis said of the decision to be so open about her father’s journey. “If we can take something that we’re struggling with as a family to help other people, to turn it around to make something beautiful about it, that’s really special for us.”
