Bruce Willis exhibited 'alarming' dementia warning signs, wife says
'For someone who is very talkative and very engaged, he was just a little more quiet'
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Emma Heming Willis is opening up on “alarming” warning signs that emerged as Bruce Willis’ health started to deteriorate prior to his diagnosis with frontotemporal dementia.
“For someone who is very talkative and very engaged, he was just a little more quiet,” Emma tells Diane Sawyer in a new special, Emma & Bruce Willis: The Unexpected Journey. “It felt a little removed, very cold, not like Bruce, who was very warm and affectionate,” she said in a clip that aired on Good Morning America this week. “To (go) the complete opposite of that was alarming and scary.”
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Emma, who shares daughters Mabel Ray, 13, and Evelyn Penn, 11, with the Die Hard star, said her husband is “still very mobile” and “in really great health overall,” but added that “his brain is failing him.”
Still, she says that Willis’ family have learned how to maintain a connection with him.
“The language is going, and, you know, we’ve learned to adapt. And we have a way of communicating with him, which is just a… different way,” she said.
After an acting career that stretched back more than 40 years, Willis’ family announced he was retiring following his diagnosis with aphasia in March 2022.
The following year, the father of five’s loved ones revealed that he was suffering from a type of dementia known as frontotemporal dementia.
“FTD is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone,” the Moonlighting star’s family wrote in a statement on the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration website at the time.
Three years after going public with Willis’ diagnosis, Emma said there are still flashes where she is briefly visited by the man she married 16 years ago.
“Not days, but we get moments. It’s his laugh, right? Like, he has such, like, a hearty laugh. And, you know, sometimes you’ll see that twinkle in his eye, or that smirk, and, you know, I just get, like, transported. And it’s just hard to see, because as quickly as those moments appear, then it goes,” she said.
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Emma said she decided to detail his family’s ordeal in a new book, The Unexpected Journey, so she could help families going through similar struggles.
“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,” the 47-year-old former model shared on Instagram when she announced the book back in April. “Today, life looks different for me and our family.”
Speaking at the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement Forum earlier this year, Emma recounted how the future the two of them had dreamed of together “vanished” when her husband’s diagnosis was confirmed.
“On the day Bruce got his diagnosis, we left the doctor’s office with a pamphlet and a hollow goodbye. No plan, no guidance, no hope, just shock,” she said, according to PEOPLE.
“The future we imagined simply vanished, and I was left trying to hold my family together, raise our two young daughters, and care for the man I love while navigating a disease I barely understood.”
Emma said she felt “lost, isolated and scared.”
In her interview with Sawyer, Emma said that if she could ask her husband one thing, she would want to know how he’s doing.
“If he’s OK,” she said, fighting back tears. “If he feels OK. If there’s anything we could do to support him better. I would really love to know that. If he’s scared. If he’s ever worried. You know? I would just love to be able to have a conversation with him.”
Willis’ first wife, actress Demi Moore, and his eldest daughters — Rumer, 37, Scout, 34, and Tallulah, 31 — have also rallied around the actor.
When he celebrated his 70th birthday earlier this year, his family all showered him with love on social media.
“He’s a spaceman, a hero with a badge, a sassy detective with unparalleled banter – and it’s been a privilege to witness all these different characters (enlivened), and engraved into history because of his innate spirit and soul,” Tallulah wrote in a social media post.
Asked what love is by Sawyer, Emma tearfully said the emotion is “beautiful” as a slideshow of images with his children played overtop. “It’s grand,” she said. “It’s unconditional.”
The Unexpected Journey releases next month.
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