Bruce Willis, who suffers from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), was captured in a rare photograph with his family.
The 69-year-old retired Die Hard actor was seen smiling at his daughter Scout, 33, as they sat together on the sofa, while Tallulah, 30, looked up at him from her seat on the floor.
When Willis and Scout touch noses in a second picture, he is holding a sign that says “Best Dad Ever.” Tallulah just wrote “Grateful” as a caption on the post.
The action star’s family announced in February 2023 that he had been diagnosed with FTD, calling it “a cruel disease.” It happened not long after Willis quit acting because of a brain disorder called aphasia, which makes it hard to speak and understand language.
The NHS says that FTD is a rare form of dementia that makes it hard to communicate and behave. It affects the front and sides of the brain, specifically the frontal and temporal lobes. It usually starts slowly and gets worse over time.
This past month, Willis’s wife Emma Heming talked about how the disease has changed Willis’s daily life, like how he can not walk or make decisions.
“It began in Bruce’s temporal lobes and has since spread to the frontal part of his brain.” “It attacks and destroys a person’s ability to move, think, and decide what to do,” she said.
Since Willis already had a stutter, Heming said it was hard for doctors to see early signs of the disease.
She said, “As his language changed, it seemed like it was just a part of a stutter; it was just Bruce.” “I would never in a million years think it was a form of dementia in someone that young.”
“I say that FTD whispers, not shouts,” she went on. “I find it hard to say, ‘This is where Bruce ended and this is where his disease began to take over.'”
His official diagnosis was two years ago, but we had a rough diagnosis of aphasia a year before that. Aphasia is a sign of a disease, but it is not the disease itself.
Willis married Neil Heming, who is 46 years old, in 2009. They have two daughters together, Mabel, 12, and Evelyn, 10. Along with his ex-wife Demi Moore, the actor has three children: Scout, Tallulah, and Rumer, who is 36 years old.
According to a story in Town & Country last month, Heming does not hide parts of Willis’s illness from their children, Mabel and Evelyn.
“I have never tried to make things sound better for them.” Bruce has been getting worse over the years as they have grown up. “I am not trying to hide it from them,” she said. “They know that Daddy is not going to get better,” she added.
