Nobody was more affected than Bruce Willis’s family, especially his daughter Tallulah Willis, when the world and Hollywood learned of his rapidly deteriorating health.
Once a mainstay of the action genre, the Die Hard actor was forced into retirement after taking a hiatus from acting in 2022 due to a diagnosis of dementia, specifically frontotemporal degeneration.
The disease impacts the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, which are in charge of personality, behavior, and language, according to the Mayo Clinic.
In an honest interview with Vogue in 2023, Tallulah revealed how her 69-year-old father’s illness affected her emotionally.
“Earlier this year, we learned that Bruce Willis’s aphasia—a brain-mediated incapacity to speak or understand speech—was a symptom of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive neurological disorder that steadily impairs his behavior and cognition. My family first reported that he had aphasia in early 2022. However, I’ve known for a while that something wasn’t right,” she remarked.
“The family attributed the initial vague unresponsiveness to Hollywood hearing loss: ‘Speak up!'” Dad’s ears were tampered with by Die Hard. I took it personally when that lack of response spread later.
“I thought he had lost interest in me after he had two kids with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis.” My teenage brain tortured me with some incorrect math, even though this couldn’t be further from the truth: “I’m not interesting enough for my father, and I’m not beautiful enough for my mother.”
“I acknowledge that I’ve reacted to Bruce’s decline in recent years with avoidance and denial that I’m not proud of,” she continued. In actuality, I was too sick to cope with it.
Tallulah continued by talking about her experience with body dysmorphia, a psychiatric illness in which an individual becomes fixated on their appearance.
Regardless of the situation, she said, her father still remembers her, and she now makes an effort to treasure the time she has with him.
Then, in a devastating statement, she said she thought “this is the beginning of sadness.”
“This little creature is changing every hour, and there’s this thing with my dad that can shift so quickly and unpredictably,” she told me.
“I’m just so happy to be here for what feels like a unique and special time in my family.”
