Bruce Willis’s Battle with Dementia: A Hollywood Star’s Tragic Decline

2023-10-13 21:15:00
Hollywood actor Bruce Willis has lost much of his verbal and cognitive ability (Photo: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Movie star Bruce Willis faces his worst challenge today, and not exactly acting. Glenn Gordon Caron, friend and creator of Moonlighting, a television series that brought them to stardom in the 80s, assured that the American actor’s communication skills have suffered a serious decline in the midst of his fight once morest the dementia that he was diagnosed with at the beginning. 2023, which currently has him depressed and “he is no longer fully verbal.”

This week, the filmmaker and producer told the New York Post that he has been visiting the protagonist of Die Hard almost every month following learning in March 2022 that he was diagnosed with aphasia, a disorder caused by brain damage that affects the ability to communicate. verbal and written. Later, at the beginning of 2023, it was confirmed that this is due to the fact that the actor suffers from frontotemporal dementia.

About his visits to the 68-year-old actor, Caron confessed that Willis was a fan of reading, but he didn’t want anyone to know. However, he points out that he has currently stopped reading and sees him severely deteriorating due to the progression of his illness. “I have the feeling that in the first three minutes he knows who I am,” he says. “He’s not totally verbal, he used to be a voracious reader and now he doesn’t read. He no longer has all those linguistic skills.”

Filmmaker Glenn Gordon Caron, a friend of Willis, says that in his visits to the actor he sees that he is “no longer totally verbal” (Ray Tamarra/GC Images)

Although he is grateful that the actor is still alive, he affirms that “the joy of living” that characterized him “has disappeared.” Sadly, he emphasized the sudden change in his personality. “What makes his illness so mind-blowing is that if you’ve ever spent time with Bruce Willis, there’s no one who had more joie de vivre than him,” the film director continued. “He loved waking up every morning and trying to live life to the fullest, but now he lives as if he sees life through the screen of a door.”

Caron was the creator of Moonlighting, the successful ABC series that catapulted the German-born actor and where the two established a friendship that prevails to this day. The screenwriter also managed to tell Willis that the famous series was going to be streamed on Hulu and made him understand, as it was before Willis’s health condition worsened. “I know he’s very happy that the series is going to be available to people, even though he can’t tell me,” Glenn told The Post. “When I was able to spend time with him, we talked regarding it and I know he’s excited.”

The protagonist of Armageddon announced his departure from Hollywood at the beginning of 2022, following being diagnosed with aphasia. His family did not give details regarding the causes. However, a year later it was learned that Demi Moore’s ex-partner suffers from frontotemporal dementia, an untreatable disease characterized by severe and progressive cognitive impairment of behavior, language and personality.

Bruce Willis and his wife Emma Heming, who is his “care partner” in the midst of his degenerative dementia (Getty Images)

He is currently under the care of his wife of 45 years, Emma Heming, with whom he shares his latest daughters Mabel, 11, and Evelyn, 9. She refers to herself as her husband’s “care partner.” and stated that he does not know exactly if Willis is aware of his condition.

On the Today show, Heming revealed how he is coping with the devastating situation. “Dementia is hard for the person diagnosed, it is also hard for the family. And that’s no different for Bruce, or me, or our daughters. When they say it’s a family disease, it really is,” she said.

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