Bruce Willis' family attributed his dementia to 'Hollywood hearing loss', reveals daughter

Tallulah Willis, one of the daughters of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, has penned a piece for Vogue discussing her father's battle with dementia. In March last year, Willis' family announced that the Die Hard star would be retiring from acting due to his diagnosis of aphasia, a language disorder resulting from brain damage that affects communication abilities. Earlier this year in February, the family announced the actor's Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) diagnosis, which is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. These regions are responsible for controlling behaviour, emotions, and language, so people suffering from the condition may experience changes in personality, behaviour, and language abilities.

What does Tallulah Willis say?

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In the Vogue essay, Tallulah writes, "My family announced in early 2022 that Bruce Willis was suffering from aphasia, a brain-mediated inability to speak or to understand speech, and we learned earlier this year that that symptom was a feature of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive neurological disorder that chips away at his cognition and behavior day by day. But I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time. It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss: Speak up! Die Hard messed with Dad’s ears.”

She added that the unresponsiveness she observed in her father had expanded, and at times she internalised it as a personal matter. With Bruce Willis having two children with her stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, she mistakenly believed that he had lost interest in her. Despite this assumption being far from reality, her adolescent mind subjected itself to self-inflicted torment, questioning her own worthiness: "I'm not beautiful enough for my mother, I'm not interesting enough for my father."

Tallulah admitted that she has dealt with Bruce's decline in recent years by avoiding and denying it, which she is not proud of. The truth, she said, is that she was personally struggling with her own illness and was unable to handle it.

"For the last four years, I have suffered from anorexia nervosa, which I’ve been reluctant to talk about because, after getting sober at age 20, restricting food has felt like the last vice that I got to hold on to," she said.

Also Read:From Die Hard to The Sixth Sense, 10 Bruce Willis movies that prove he's a Hollywood icon

Bruce Willis and his celebrated career

Willis has been active in the entertainment industry since the late 1970s. He rose to fame in the 1980s as a leading actor in the TV series Moonlighting and went on to become one of the most popular action movie stars of the 1990s and 2000s. He has acted in a wide variety of films, ranging from action movies to comedies and dramas. Some of his most notable film roles include John McClane in the Die Hard films, Korben Dallas in The Fifth Element, Dr Malcolm Crowe in The Sixth Sense,and Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction.

Throughout his career, Willis has received numerous awards and accolades, including an Emmy Award for his role in Moonlighting, a Golden Globe Award for the same, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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