Bruce Willis: What Only True Fans Know About Hollywood’s Action Hero

27 Oct Bruce Willis: What Only True Fans Know About Hollywood’s Action Hero

That changed for “Rugrats Go Wild”;  suddenly Spike could speak, or at least  be understood, because crossover character Eliza Thornberry communicates with animals. Willis had an instantly-recognizable voice and a playful side to his personality, so it made sense that every now and then he’d lend his pipes to projects like “Bruno the Kid,” the “Look Who’s Talking” movies and “Over the Hedge.” “At the time, ABC was interested in a couple of actors and finding the right vehicle for them,” Thicke told “Good Morning America” in 2011. “‘Growing Pains’ was one of the vehicles — I was one of the guys. And the other guy was Bruce Willis. So, I guess there would have been a chance that I would have been in ‘Moonlighting’ and Bruce Willis would have been their dad.”

1. The series also featured many well-known voice actors of the day, including Tim Curry, Mark Hamill, Jennifer Hale, and Frank Welker.
2. Although not a wine cooler, he admits to having a glass of wine with meals.
3. He still can’t get over what happened with The Artist, in which he took a small role as a Hollywood mogul.
4. Entertainment Weekly called Willis’s performance flat and “inert,” while the New York Times found the suspense sorely lacking.

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Collaborators on film sets reported Willis seeming unaware, out of sorts, and having such difficulty remembering and delivering his lines that scripts would be edited on the fly to accommodate the actor. He also sometimes required the use of an earpiece (through which an assistant would feed him his lines) and a body double. Such films were throwbacks to box office fare of the ’80s and ’90s, sometimes featuring stars of the era in a limited capacity, but enough that producers can put a certain face and name on the poster. Before his diagnosis and retirement, Willis had been facing increasingly-loud displeasure from certain corners of the pop culture landscape, wondering how the star of “Die Hard” had become the king of Redbox. Through two high-profile celebrity marriages, he’s become a dad five times over, the father of only daughters.

: Die Hard sequels, Pulp Fiction and dramatic roles

I ask her about their working relationship on the set of Roseanne, about what aspects he brought to the role of Dan Conner. What I most want to know, I think, is what he’s like as a person when he’s off screen and relaxed, when he feels loved and fulfilled. “It was getting to be too much,” he tells me. “It was 30 years of a disease that was taking its toll on everyone around me and it had got eco sober house review to the point where, every time I did it, it was becoming more and more debilitating. It was life or death. It was time to stop.” “A lot of individual things. She had fallen in love with this guy and brought him along and this kind of upset the balance. But, you know…” He gives an epic shrug. “And if I thought I was making some sort of statement, then I was in the wrong fucking business.”

He was diagnosed with aphasia

Aphasia generally affects how people speak and understand language, but the severity of it varies. Damage to the temporal lobe in the brain affects the ability to understand speech; additional damage to the frontal lobe affects the ability to speak. It’s unclear to what extent Willis is affected, but as expert Swathi Kiran writes in The Independent, most people affected by aphasia have trouble recalling words. Of course, for as much as these performances look like outliers in a career otherwise loaded with action vehicles and studio comedies, their roots twist all the way back to the most iconic of Willis roles, his breakout turn in the original Die Hard.

“She began speaking in the voice of my brother, cursing like he did. Tears rolled down my face and now I know the switch is not turned off, that there is life after death. I don’t know how it works but I believe it.” The studio utilized motion capture and photo-mapping to copy Willis’s likeness for the main character, and he also provided the voice. Though the studio did hit a few snags along the way, “Apocalypse” was fairly well-received by game critics — even if almost no one alcohol and bipolar disorder remembers it now. According to an interview with the Washington Post in 2005, Willis and Keitel were neighbors while Willis was living in Los Angeles. The two struck up a conversation in which Willis mentioned that he was a big fan of “Reservoir Dogs.” Keitel revealed to Willis that he was about to do another picture with Tarantino and a day later, Keitel invited Willis to a barbecue at his home. It just so happened that the “Pulp Fiction” director was also in attendance.

This came shortly after he was reportedly fired from Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society” because he couldn’t memorize his lines, according to Cinemablend. He played a small but memorable role in “Pulp Fiction,” which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and won the Palm D’Or at Cannes, according to its IMDb awards page. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense,” which garnered six Oscar nominations (via IMDb). That’s not to mention his appearances in the critically acclaimed movies “12 Monkeys” and “Moonrise Kingdom,” according to IMDb.

For much of the ’80s and throughout the ’90s, Willis was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet — with help from longtime agent Arnold Rifkin, at one time the president of the William Morris Agency. In 2000, Willis and Rifkin formed Cheyenne Enterprises, a production company that would produce both films with Willis and without him. While Bruce Willis had enjoyed a successful film career, he didn’t lose his love for the theater. In 2015, he found his way onto the Broadway stage, playing Paul Sheldon in a stage adaptation of Stephen King’s thriller, “Misery.” Playing opposite Willis as the obsessed fan, Annie Wilkes, was Laurie Metcalf of “Roseanne” fame. The story has Sheldon, a famous author, at the mercy of his “number one fan,” Annie, who takes him into her home after he breaks both of his legs in a bad car wreck.

It was Wes Anderson who perhaps most fruitfully exploited this lovelorn aspect of his persona in Moonrise Kingdom, planting him within an ensemble of typically sad-sack Anderson eccentrics. His character, Captain Sharp, is the sheriff of a New England island in the ’50s who is carrying on a doomed affair with a married woman (Frances McDormand). Willis, who made a name for himself as a more “ordinary” action hero, has never looked more ordinary than he does here, under thick glasses and a tucked-in, buttoned-up uniform.

Aphasia, a brain disorder that can lead to problems speaking or understanding words, can be a symptom. The Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration describes FTD as a group of brain disorders caused by degeneration of the frontal and/or temporal lobes of the brain that affects behaviour, language and movement. Her family told People they don’t know where she is and cannot call her themselves, but she can call them. Her son says in the documentary that doctors had connected her cognitive issues to alcohol use, People reported. “The people who love her cannot see her,” People quoted Williams’s sister Wanda as saying. “The place we are all at together with each other is the best place we have ever been.

“You get it for novelty, for being fascinating to watch in some character role. But the ‘Die Hard’ stuff and ‘Dirty Harry’ are all fraught with the same thing that every story is fraught with.” There’s no denying that, in some respects, Willis’s work in movies art therapy for addiction like 12 Monkeys, The Sixth Sense, and Moonrise Kingdom is touching through context, as an alternative to his larger body of work. Seeing someone very famous for playing unflappable men of action get in touch with his soft side is reliably disarming.

Though Willis and Moore divorced in 2000, the two continued to have a strong friendship. With the news of Little Richard’s death in 2020, Moore posted a wedding photograph of herself and Willis with Little Richard on Instagram, saying, “Bruce and I were so lucky and honored to have him officiate our wedding back in 1987 — thankful for the memories.” Bruce Willis’s former marriage to Demi Moore may be old news in 2022, but for 13 years the power couple was the talk of the town and the subject of plenty of tabloid drama.