Health

Bruce Willis’ daughter describes early signs of dementia family missed

Tallulah Willis, the youngest daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, knew for a long time that something wasn’t quite right about her famous father, whom she remembers as being “cool and charming and slick and stylish and sweet and a little wacky.”

What wasn’t right was hard to define, the 29-year-old said in a new essay for Vogue.  “It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss,” Tallaluh Willis said in the essay, explaining that her mother and her father’s current wife, Emma Heming Willis, wondered if explosions and other loud sound effects surrounding the 68-year-old actor on movie sets damaged his hearing.

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 18: Tallulah Belle Willis attends the screening of "Hala" during AFI FEST 2019 presented by Audi at TCL Chinese 6 Theatres on November 18, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 18: Tallulah Belle Willis attends the screening of “Hala” during AFI FEST 2019 presented by Audi at TCL Chinese 6 Theatres on November 18, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images) 

“Later that unresponsiveness broadened, and I sometimes took it personally,” Tallulah admitted, saying that the early signs of her father’s frontotemporal dementia (FTD) began when she was still in adolescence. At the time, she said she was deeply insecure about being the child of glamorous movie stars and was dealing with severe body dysmorphia that would lead to anorexia nervosa and repeat hospitalizations.

“He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me,” Tallulah said. “Though this couldn’t have been further from the truth, my adolescent brain tortured itself with some faulty math: I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father.”

As Willis’ family came to learn, the father of five was suffering from FTD, a progressive neurological disorder that Tallulah said “chips away at his cognition and behavior day by day.” Willis and his family were initially told that he had aphasia — an inability to speak or understand speech — and made that diagnosis public in 2022. But earlier this year, they announced that they learned he actually has FTD.

Tallulah Willis’s essay focuses on regrets that she and her family didn’t recognize the signs of dementia sooner, but also provides an explanation and self-forgiveness for how she was too seriously ill herself to see that her father was in trouble.

“I admit that I have met Bruce’s decline in recent years with a share of avoidance and denial that I’m not proud of,” said Tallulah Willis, the actor’s third daughter. “The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it.” She also said: “While I was wrapped up in my body dysmorphia, flaunting it on Instagram, my dad was quietly struggling.”

Tallulah Willis said she was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa four years ago. She also was admitted to a residential treatment facility, where she began to address the depression that had plagued her since adolescence.

Meanwhile, the “Die Hard” star was undergoing a battery of cognitive tests, but the family had yet to receive a diagnosis. Tallulah Willis said she had trouble feeling much about what her father was going through, but “the bad feelings” hit her when she attended a friend’s wedding in the summer of 2021.

“The bride’s father made a moving speech,” she wrote. “Suddenly I realized that I would never get that moment, my dad speaking about me in adulthood at my wedding. It was devastating. I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes.”

Tallulah Willis said she continued to struggle with her eating disorder while her father’s condition worsened. After dropping to 84 pounds and realizing that she’d didn’t have the energy to walk around her Los Angeles neighborhood, she said she went to another rehab facility. There she got a new diagnosis: borderline personality disorder, a mental illness that impairs a person’s ability to regulate their emotions and their relationships with others.

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