Emma Heming Willis is opening up about her husband Bruce Willis’ battle with dementia, sharing that he’s moved into a “second home” to get 24-hour care.
The legendary 70-year-old actor, known for his roles in the Die Hard films, Moonlighting, Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense, among others, had his Hollywood career abruptly end in 2023, when his family announced that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. “FTD is an umbrella term for a group of brain diseases that mainly affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain,” according to the Mayo Clinic. It can impact a person’s personality, behavior and language.
Heming Willis told Diane Sawyer in an ABC News special Tuesday night that she first noticed something was wrong before the actor was officially diagnosed when he “would always love taking the girls to school, and then those school runs just started to not happen as much.”
She continued, “I just thought, ‘God, that is so weird because for someone who was very talkative and very engaged, he was just a little more quiet, and when the family would get together, he would kind of just melt a little bit.”
The model and entrepreneur noted that she “didn’t understand what was happening” at first, admitting she questioned their marriage at the time as their partnership “doesn’t feel like a marriage anymore.” Heming Willis met Bruce Willis in 2005, but told Sawyer it took two years before she agreed to go on a date with him. They later tied the knot in 2009 in Turks and Caicos, and share 11-year-old and 13-year-old daughters (The actor also shares three daughters with ex-wife Demi Moore).
Bruce Willis was later diagnosed with aphasia at first, which causes people to lose words, but after his symptoms got worse over the next year, that’s when he was officially diagnosed with FTD.
Heming Willis said she informed their daughters “pretty quickly” after their dad was diagnosed, as she “never wanted them to think that he wasn’t paying attention to them.”
As for how the actor is doing now, she shared that Bruce Willis is still walking, physically healthy and seemingly not aware of his condition. “Bruce is still very mobile. Bruce is in really great health overall, you know, it’s just his brain that is failing him,” she told Sawyer.
She also noted that she does feel the actor still recognizes her and his family. “I know he does. When we are with him, he lights up,” she shared. “He’s holding our hands, we’re kissing him, we’re hugging him, [and] he is reciprocating, you know, he is into it. And so that’s all I need.”
Heming Willis later revealed that she made the difficult decision to move Bruce Willis into a “second home” nearby, one that was safer for him and so that he could live with his 24-hour care team.
“It was one of the hardest decisions that I’ve had to make so far,” she admitted. “But I knew first and foremost, Bruce would want that for our daughters, you know, he wouldn’t want them to be in a home that was more tailored to their needs, not his needs.” She added that they’re at the second home all the time, spending time with the actor, saying it’s “a house that is filled with love and warmth and care and laughter.”
Heming Willis is not only sharing her experience navigating the actor’s dementia diagnosis but also the impact it’s had on their family in her upcoming book, The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path. It releases on Sept. 7.
She’s also become an advocate for caregivers, pushing for support for families and loved ones of people living with conditions like dementia. “It doesn’t matter where we came from, who we’re married to, that level of sadness and grief and anger and the resentment and all of this, it is one common thread that we all share,” Heming Willis said. “And I think that there is something so beautiful in that.”