Bruce Willis found ways to continue to work and appear on screen through the beginning of his degenerative illness, his wife has revealed in her forthcoming book.
Australian News.com. au website reports that Willis’s plan to continue working as long as he was able will be detailed in Emma Heming Willis’s upcoming book – one she calls “not a memoir but under the category of self-help” – The Unexpected Journey, due for release in September.
The Die Hard star announced in February 2023 that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. He had retreated from the spotlight a year earlier due to his deteriorating health.
However, according to news.com.au, Heming Willis’s book will reveal that her action hero husband had found ways to continue to work on films such as Assassin (2023) and the Detective Knight series (2022-23), having directors reduce his dialogue and employing a trusted friend to feed him lines through an earpiece.
The website adds that the actor’s deterioration wasn’t immediately apparently either on set or on screen, because Willis had always had a slow speech pattern, after having a stutter as a child – something he once told interviewer Michael Parkinson he was able to put to good effect:
“It’s how I got my sense of humour, because I realised, yeah I stutter, but I could make people laugh by doing stupid stuff.”
Heming Willis shared on Instagram that she had written the book to help others facing her husband’s condition, as well as their families.
She said: “I really wrote the book that I wish someone had handed me the day we got our diagnosis with no hope, no direction … not much. Today life looks different for me and our family because I was able to put support into place.”
As well as his successful turns in the Die Hard franchise, Willis has enjoyed a string of hit films including Look Who’s Talking, The Sixth Sense and Death Becomes Her. He had his breakthrough success in early 1980s TV series Moonlighting, co-starring with Cybil Shepherd as private detectives David Addison and Maddie Hayes.
