His latest film, Paradise City (2022), was released just a few months ago, last November, and although it should have been an epic farewell for an actor loved by the public, it passed with more pain than glory. It was the fifth filming in which Bruce Willis had participated in the year and the criticism was severe, no longer with his performance –which under other circumstances they probably would have dismissed, as they did so many times before they found out he was sick–, but with him. script. It didn’t matter to him: he hardly read the comments, a victim of what is now known to be a form of dementia that affects his speech and cognitive abilities.
However, it is likely that he enjoyed that filming in Hawaii more than all the others to which he added his name towards the end of his career, in a compulsive and urgent raid, aware that he would there was little time left on the sets. The reason is as simple as the years-long friendship that unites him with an increasingly lonely John Travolta, especially after their remembered duo in Pulp Fiction (1994), which marked a return that was glorious for both of them.
Bruce and John were companions beyond the lights of the studios, in thousands of outings as a couple, along with the then wife of the Die Hard (1988) actor, Demi Moore – mother of their three eldest daughters Rumer (34), Scout (31) and Tallulah (29)–, and the missing Kelly Preston. It is not the only absence in the lives of the actors who became inseparable while recording Look Who’s Talking, in 1989: the unmistakable voice of someone who today can barely make himself understood was none other than Mikey, the baby of the also missing Kirstie Alley, who died of colon cancer last December.
When a year ago Moore, Willis’s current wife –Emma Heming–, and their five daughters –he has Mabel (11) and Evelyn (8) with Heming– shared with their fans a first diagnosis of aphasia that, according to what they said at the time, impacted on his memory and communication skills, and they announced that, for this reason, and “after much consideration”, he would leave the race “that meant so much to him”, the first to express his support was a devastated Travolta, who shortly after he would also lose his beloved Olivia Newton-John. “We became friends in two of our biggest hits,” the actor who broke down a week ago at the Oscars when presenting the In memoriam wrote on his Instagram account. He once told me: ‘John, I want you to know that every time something good happens to you it’s like it happened to me’, that’s how generous Bruce’s soul is and for that I love him ”.
Like many of Willis’s friends, Travolta knew that he and Heming had begun dumping their luxury properties outside of California five years earlier, without the press or producers suspecting why. First it was his mountain home in Sun Valley, Idaho, which they practically gave away in October 2018 for $5.5 million, a third of what they bought it for. Later, they traded in their beloved 5,500-square-foot duplex in Central Park for a 2,200-square-foot condo near Lincoln Center. They also sold their Westchester home for much less than its original $12 million. And in 2019, they sold the spectacular mansion on the paradisiacal islands of Turks and Caicos for US$27 million, where they were married a decade earlier.
The actor with more than 150 credits between leading and minor roles was making one movie after another and it was hard to believe that he was short of cash. At the time, he said the only reason he was looking to reduce his real estate was that it was all too far away from his family in California: “That’s why we’ve decided to go back to the West Coast and make our home there.” ”. He was not lying, and the pandemic did the rest: Willis, Heming, Mabel and Evelyn spent a good part of their quarantine with Moore –to whom he was married between 1987 and 2000–, Rumer, Scout and Tallulah, and the photo of the family assembled in Identical striped pajamas – which he even wore to his dog – made him as iconic again as he was in the 90s. Two decades after their separation, Willis and Moore seemed closer than ever.
After the statement in which the seven women in Willis’s life told the world that the actor suffered from an irreversible disorder, some connected the dots. His friends revealed in those days off the record that Bruce, 67, had been preparing for this moment for a long time. Then it did not come out what the family would reveal only last month: the pathology that caused the notorious aphasia in Willis is a frontotemporal dementia that progresses inclemently and hinders his ability to express himself and understand others, something that the doctors had warned him for a long time. . “He knew that as his health weakened, there would come a point where his earning power would drop substantially. Therefore, while he was lucid, he made all the necessary financial arrangements so that the girls did not lack for anything, ”a source close to Page Six revealed.
The revelations of his different colleagues to the Los Angeles Times last year indicate that many colleagues, directors and producers saw him lost on different film sets. And yet, by their own decision or by mandate of a machine that continued to exploit it to the last drop -because each premiere with their name and their photo on the poster was a number, even though the scriptwriters had to run to cut the lines that no longer could remember – Willis filmed more than 20 films in the last four years, despite the fact that today everyone admits on a low note that he was already sick. In fact, last year’s Razzie Awards – or “anti-Oscars” – handed out just a week before his status was made public, singled him out for Cosmic Sin as if it were a category unto itself: “Worst Bruce Willis of the Year. Later they had to withdraw it due to the conviction in the networks.
In the post in which the women in his life confirmed the news, there is a phrase, his favorite, that gives a clue as to why he decided to continue acting until he could and even beyond: “Live it up”, something like like “Living to the fullest”, and also with all the luxury possible. That is where his friends also assure that the actor had a single obsession since the diagnosis, in addition to sharing time with his family, and it was being able to leave them the most money at seven.
“I knew that eventually he was not going to be able to travel anymore and that he was not going to need so many apartments or mansions, but he did need a safe environment where he could be surrounded by them. He wanted to simplify his life and theirs as much as possible, ”one of his close friends told Page Six.
In any case, it is sad to imagine that guy who became famous at the age of 30 as the sexy detective in Moonlighting (1985-1989) alongside Cybill Shepherd and, above all, as John McClane, the anti-hero policeman with answers as quick as his shots in the Die Hard saga, forced to continue acting in recent years, when he was no longer capable of even performing on camera the choreography he had rehearsed the most in his life: drawing a weapon.
Witnesses cited a year ago in the Los Angeles Times note assured that Bruce had been dictating his lines for a long time – increasingly shorter – for a hearing aid and was replaced by stuntmen in shooting scenes. And they even questioned the real awareness of the actor about what was happening on the set of the last films he shot.
Walter Bruce Willis turns 68 today: he was born on March 18, 1955 in Idar-Oberstein, a town in Federal Germany, in the first decade of the postwar period. Her mother, Marlene Kassel, is German, and her father, David, was an American soldier who fell in love with her while serving on a military base. Hence the latest news about the actor, not at all encouraging, comes from Germany, where the actor still has cousins and uncles who closely follow his health.
This week, his uncle-in-law Wilfried Gliem, a musician married to Marlene’s first cousin, told Bild magazine what Willis’s own mother told her recently: “She’s not sure if her son recognizes her, her behavior is slow and a bit aggressive.
The Willis-Kassels moved to New Jersey in 1957 and the actor’s younger brothers were born there, but they always kept in touch and periodically visited his Teutonic family. Perhaps it was because he changed countries and languages when he was only two years old: as a child, Bruce stuttered so much that he was nicknamed “Buck-Buck” at school. It was because of that stutter that Marlene enrolled him in drama classes: when he acted, her son spoke fluently.
Thus he found his vocation. He enrolled in drama school right out of high school, but he was also a private detective and bartender. Someday it would all add up to compose his characters, but at first it was just about making a living. He had only minor film roles and acted off-Broadway until, at the age of 30, he landed the role of David Addison in Moonlighting after auditioning among 3,000 applicants. That character earned him an Emmy and a Golden Globe and established him as a comedian.
In the midst of that success, in 1987 he was called to star in his first film, Blind Date, with none other than Kim Basinger, who had just come off the boom of Nine and a Half Weeks (1986). And then everything happened in a dizzying way, as if the dam that was holding back his career had suddenly been released: a beverage brand hired him as an image for millions (at the same time he terminated the contract because he stopped drinking alcohol) and he became the actor of the moment; he was filming Die Hard and he didn’t use doubles even for the risk scenes, but on stage he showed himself as an ordinary guy, with little desire to become a hero; in any case he was an accidental hero who had no choice. Or as the tagline of the second film in the saga said: “The wrong guy, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”
They started comparing him to John Wayne and Steve McQueen. Bruce was the new synonym for cool American. And then, on the verge of the 90s, at a premiere, also in 1987, he met Demi Moore and planets collided. It was July and it was not just any premiere, but that of Stakeout, starring Emilio Estevez, Martin Sheen’s son, Charlie’s brother, and her boyfriend.
The romance was explosive. She tells it in her biography, in whose presentation Bruce and Emma were present. “Unplanned, we went to Las Vegas, and we were about to move to a gambling table, when Bruce says, ‘We should get married.’ We had been making jokes about it the entire flight, but suddenly it didn’t seem like it was a joke anymore,” she writes. That’s how a judge was called to his suite at the Golden Nugget Hotel, and they were married in front of just a handful of attendees.
A month later, on November 21, they repeated the vows in front of their friends in Hollywood. For him it was the first time. She had already been married for five years to musician Freddie Moore, whose stage name she kept. Legend has it that Demi became pregnant with her eldest daughter, Rumer – who was born in August 1988 – on the same wedding night. Scout was born in 1991; Tallulah, in 1994, along with the mega-hit that was Pulp Fiction.
The eyes of the world were on them (they even did the Beavis and Butthead animated movie together!): they were the king and queen of cool, setting trends in fashion and naming their daughters outlandishly. They soon became the brand of the 90s along with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger: Planet Hollywood, as they called their chain of bars and restaurants. After their separation, in 1998, they would also pioneer as one of the first couples in the industry able to function as a family even after marital love ended.
At the time, Willis told Rolling Stone: “We have three daughters together that we will continue to raise together, and we are probably closer today than we ever were. We realize that our commitment to our daughters is for life, and our friendship continues.” That was as certain as that Bruce was one of the guests at Demi’s wedding with Ashton Kutcher – and also her support in the divorce of Mila Kunis’s husband today-; and Demi and Kutcher were at Bruce’s 2009 wedding to Heming in Turks and Caicos.
The end of the century coincided with the golden years of his career: Tarantino’s momentum gave him different leading roles, such as 12 Monkeys (1995), The Fifth Element (1997), Armageddon (1998), and The Sixth Sense (1999), which They were located on the podium of commercial and critical successes. He kicked off the millennium by allowing himself to play the father of Ross’s young girlfriend in Friends, and the public celebrated him again: he won an Emmy for best Guest Actor in a Comedy.
He was always irreducible in his liberalism: in his vision it was desirable for the State to intervene as little as possible. “I’m sick of answering the same thing. I am a Republican as long as I want a smaller administration, less government intrusion”, he took offense at a journalist who ran him out of a premiere in Manhattan, in 2006, to ask him what he thought of George Bush (h). He had supported Bush Sr. against Bill Clinton, but refused to support Republican Bob Dole in the campaign against Clinton because he criticized the film Striptease (1996), which Moore starred in. “What I want is that they stop shitting on my money and yours and on the taxes for which we give them 50% each year. If they do that, I’m a Republican. But I hate the government, okay? So I’m apolitical. I wrote that! I am not a Republican, ”he said that time before the confused chronicler.
But whatever he said, Bruce was clear that no one was going to take offense at him. And it is that this was the constant of Willis in his career of more than four decades: the public, who loved him from the first moment just like Addison or McClane, as if he were a sexy cousin to whom things turned out well by chance. He was always willing to forgive everything. If one of his movies wasn’t that good, or if he was ever a little drunk, cheated on, advocated carrying guns, or got mad at the press, what did it matter, if that guy never played superstar?
He was there, doing the same thing that anyone would do: trying to earn a living as he was, to get the most out of it, to live it to the fullest, “thoroughly”, until the last consequences. Bruce Willis was Planet Hollywood, but never Rambo, nor Terminator: he was human. A guy who suffered and bitched and whose hair fell out, who achieved his feats even without wanting to do them. The one who didn’t want to be a hero, but he had no choice. Perhaps that is why it makes us so sad to think that we are no longer going to enjoy him in other roles, or to guess the ordeal of his latest filming: the career that ended a year ago is that of one of our own. One who lived to the fullest until his body and mind allowed it, a generous friend and a beloved father and husband who now deserves the calm that his wife prays for him, fed up with the paparazzi and onlookers shouting at his door. house or chasing your car looking for a photo or video that shows its deterioration. We already know what McClane would tell them, it’s one of the most remembered lines in movie history: “Yippee-Ki-Yay, Motherfuckers!”
