Actor Bruce Willis has frontotemporal dementia
In a statement on social media, Bruce Willis’ family said it was a “relief to finally have a clear diagnosis”
The 67-year-old was diagnosed with aphasia – which causes difficulties with speech – in spring last year, but this has progressed and he has been given a more specific diagnosis, the family said.
They expressed their “deepest gratitude for the incredible outpouring of love”.
The family went on to say frontotemporal dementia is the most common form of dementia in people under 60.
Adding to the statement “Today there are no treatments for the disease, a reality that we hope can change in the years ahead,”
He became a household name in the 1980s and 90s after starring in blockbuster films such as Die Hard, The Sixth Sense, Armageddon and Pulp Fiction.
Walter Bruce Willis was born in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany, on March 19, 1955. His mother, Marlene,was German, from Kassel. His father, David Willis, was an American soldier. Willis has a younger sister, Florence, and two younger brothers, Robert (deceased) and David. After being discharged from the military in 1957, his father relocated the family to his hometown of Carneys Willis has described his background as a “long line of blue-collar people”.His mother worked in a bank and his father was a welder, master mechanic, and factory worker.
Willis, who spoke with a stutter, attended Penns Grove High School, where his schoolmates nicknamed him “Buck-Buck”. He joined the drama club, found that acting on stage reduced his stutter, and was eventually elected student council president
After graduating from high school in 1973, Willis worked as a security guard at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant and transported crew members at the DuPont Chambers Works factory in Deepwater, New Jersey. After working as a private investigator (a role he would later play in the comedy-drama series Moonlighting and the action-comedy film The Last Boy Scout), he turned to acting. He enrolled in the Drama Program at Montclair State University, where he was cast in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He left school in 1977 and moved to New York City, where he supported himself in the early 1980s as a bartender at the Manhattan art bar Kamikaze while living in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood.
