Bruce Willis' wife, Emma Heming Willis, is opening up about the early changes she noticed in her husband that led to his diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in his 60s.
"For Bruce, it started with language," Heming Willis, 46, revealed in a new interview with Town & Country. "He had a severe stutter as a child. He went to college, and there was a theater teacher who said, 'I’ve got something that’s going to help you.' From that class, Bruce realized that he could memorize a script and be able to say it without stuttering. That’s what propelled him into acting,"
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The "Die Hard" franchise star, she added, "has always had a stutter but he has been good at covering it up."
When Willis, now 69, began speaking differently, Heming Willis had no idea it was an early sign of a serious health condition.
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"As his language started changing, it (seemed like it) was just a part of a stutter, it was just Bruce. Never in a million years would I think it would be a form of dementia for someone so young," she said.
It took several years before Willis was correctly diagnosed with FTD, said Heming Willis, noting that the disease is often "misdiagnosed," “misunderstood" or "missed" altogether.
“I say that FTD whispers, it doesn’t shout. It’s hard for me to say, ‘This is where Bruce ended, and this is where his disease started to take over,'" she said.
Willis’ family revealed in February 2023 that he had been diagnosed with FTD, after first announcing in March 2022 that he would retire from acting being diagnosed with aphasia, a condition that affects a person’s ability to express and understand written and spoken language.
Heming Willis, who shares daughters, Mabel, 12, and Evelyn, 10, with Willis, told Town & Country that the actor's adult daughters from his first marriage to Demi Moore — Rumer, 36, Scout, 33, and Tallulah, 30 — have been a part of his caregiving team from the start.
"The family respects the way I’m looking after him; they really support me," said Heming Willis. "If I need to vent, if I need to cry, if I need to rage — because all of that can happen and it’s okay to have those feelings — they are always there to listen.
"I’m so thankful that we are this blended family. They’re very supportive, very loving, and very helpful, and a lot of people don’t have that."
Heming Willis' remarks about Willis' diagnosis come more than a year after Tallulah Willis recalled noticing the early signs of her father's dementia in an emotional essay for Vogue.
The younger Willis explained that she had suspected something was wrong with her father's health “for a long time" prior to his diagnosis.
“It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss: ‘Speak up! ‘Die Hard’ messed with Dad’s ears,’” she wrote. “Later that unresponsiveness broadened, and I sometimes took it personally. He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me.”
As Tallulah Willis faced her own health struggles, which included diagnoses of borderline personality, ADHD and anorexia nervosa, she realized her dad was "quietly struggling," too.
“All kinds of cognitive testing was being conducted, but we didn’t have an acronym yet,” she said.
By the summer of 2021, Tallulah Willis was “painfully” aware that her father's health was declining. She made the realization at a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard while listening to a speech by the bride's father.
“Suddenly I realized that I would never get that moment, my dad speaking about me in adulthood at my wedding. It was devastating,” she recalled. “I left the dinner table, stepped outside and wept in the bushes.”
Now in her own recovery from her health conditions, Tallulah Willis said she is better able to be a source of joy for her famous father. “I can bring him an energy that’s bright and sunny, no matter where I’ve been,” she said.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
