The youngest daughter of Die Hard star and Hollywood icon Bruce Willis, Tallulah Willis, has offered an update on how her father is doing following his retirement from acting amid health issues. Bruce Willis, who has of course been one of the world’s biggest movie stars for decades, took the decision to walk away from acting in 2022 due to aphasia and was later diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.
Now, in an interview with E! News, Tallulah Willis has opened up about her father’s health, saying that he is doing about the same as he was a year ago. Which, she says, is a “good thing” considering his recent diagnosis.
“Our visits have so much love, and I feel that overreaches anything for me…I know he knows how much I love him; I know how much he loves me—I know how much he loves us all. It’s a hard thing for anyone going through this, but it has really created an opportunity for more love for my family.”
There’s so much love in our family. There’s not a fragility to the support, or a conditionality to how we support each other.”
Bruce Willis Remains a Beloved Hollywood Superstar Thanks to Die Hard, Pulp Fiction & More
Following Bruce Willis’ diagnosis, various headlines regarding how the actor is doing have emerged. Some of them have sadly been patently false, forcing Willis’ wife, Emma Heming Willis, to release a statement and set things straight. She said back in March this year that any reports claiming the actor has “no more joy” in his life were completely untrue and asked the media to “stop scaring people.”
“It’s Sunday morning, and I’m triggered. I just got click-baited. I’m just scrolling, minding my own business, and just saw a headline that had to do with my own family. The headline basically says there is no more joy in my husband. Now, I can just tell you, that is far from the truth… I need society and whoever is writing these stupid headlines to stop scaring people. Stop scaring people to think that once they get a diagnosis of some kind of neurocognitive disease, ‘That’s it. It’s over. Let’s pack it up. Nothing else to see here, we’re done.’ No. It is the complete opposite of that, okay?”
An old friend of Willis, Moonlighting creator Glenn Gordon Caron, meanwhile, revealed back in 2023 that, while the 12 Monkeys star is now “not totally verbal,” he is very much “still Bruce.”
“My sense is the first one to three minutes he knows who I am. He’s not totally verbal; he used to be a voracious reader — he didn’t want anyone to know that — and he’s not reading now. All those language skills are no longer available to him, and yet he’s still Bruce. When you’re with him you know that he’s Bruce and you’re grateful that he’s there.”
Best known for the likes of the Die Hard franchise, Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, The Fifth Element, Armageddon, and many, many more beloved cinematic classics, Bruce Willis’ final film roles were in the action movie Detective Knight: Independence and the sci-fi action outing Assassin.