Bruce Willis retires after being diagnosed with aphasia

Actor Bruce Willis.

The disease, a language disorder, “is affecting his cognitive abilities,” his family says in a statement, announcing that “he is leaving the career that has meant so much to him.”

‘The Jungle of Glass’, ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘Armageddon’… The American commercial cinema of the 80s and 90s had Bruce Willis as one of its biggest stars. The actor came to patent a model of action hero cut from the same pattern: rude and virile working-class males, who cynically face their tasks although they cannot prevent the sentimental vein from surfacing from time to time. The women discovered tenderness behind his rudeness, while the men saw in him the scoundrel with whom to go out for beers. With almost 150 roles behind him, Willis has never stopped working, although in recent times he no longer appeared in flashy movies. At 67 years old, we will never see him again with John McClane’s shirt in a new installment of ‘The Glass Jungle’.

The actor’s family has revealed that the actor is retiring after being diagnosed with aphasia, a brain disorder that prevents a person from communicating. It can affect the ability to speak, write and understand both verbal and written language. “We wanted to share as a family to his wonderful fans that our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which affects his cognitive abilities. As a result, and with great consideration, Bruce is walking away from the career that has meant so much to him,” reads the statement posted on the Instagram profile of his daughter Rumer Willis, who has almost a million followers.

“This is a really difficult time for our family and we are so grateful for your love, compassion and support,” the post continues. “We are going through this as a united family and we wanted to engage his fans because we know how much he means to them, just like they mean to him. As Bruce always says, ‘live it big’ and together we plan to do just that. Love”, concludes the letter, which is signed by Willis’s ex-wife, actress Demi Moore, with whom he has always had an excellent relationship despite having divorced two decades ago, along with the three daughters they had in common, Rumer , Scout and Tallulah, the actor’s current wife, Emma Heming, and the two girls he has with her, Mabel and Evelyn.

The actor sneaked into Spanish homes in the mid-1980s thanks to the series ‘Luz de luna’, where he was chosen from among 3,000 other applicants. Born in Germany in 1955, where his father was doing military service, Willis was a boy who overcame his stutter thanks to memorizing his dialogues in the theater. He worked as a waiter in New York, a security guard at a nuclear power plant, a gym teacher and an operator in a chemical factory. Marijuana arrests and monumental hangovers were part of his existence as an actor looking for work, until the $20,000 per episode of his television debut brought stability to his life.

Pay bills

While filming ‘Moonlight’, Hollywood took notice of him and Willis hit two hits in a row that demonstrated his versatility: the comedy ‘Blind Date’, alongside Kim Basinger, and ‘Jungla de cristal’. That summer of 1988, we met John McClane, a brash, foul-mouthed New York cop traveling to Los Angeles to reconcile with his wife, only to find himself embroiled in the hijacking of a skyscraper by a group of terrorists. Willis nurtured his charisma into an off-duty action hero, a grumpy guy who approached the job complaining with a permanent sneer. His war cry, “Yipikayei, son of a bitch!”, created a school.

In the 90s, Bruce Willis was one of the highest paid stars. ‘The Great Falcon’, ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’, ‘The Last Boy Scout’, ‘The Hollywood Game’, ‘Armageddon’, ‘Death suits you so well’, ‘Not a fool’s hair’, ‘ The fifth element’… The same year, 1994, he could star in a laughable erotic thriller like ‘The Color of the Night’ and the great ‘Pulp Fiction’, perhaps his most memorable role, a bought boxer who lived through all kinds of events. Under the orders of M. Night Shyamalan he demonstrated his enormous talent in two fantastic thrillers: ‘The Sixth Sense’ and ‘The Protégé’. That author cinema is absent in the last two decades of a filmography that bets on violence, with titles like ‘The mercenaries’ and ‘In dangerous lands’.

Just a few days ago, the Razzie, which rewards the worst jobs of the year, had its own category: ‘Worst performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 film’. There were eight candidates and all had been released directly in domestic format. In 2015 he tried to regain lost prestige with a theatrical performance of Stephen King’s ‘Misery’, after thirty years without stepping on stage, but the critics sank him. Since then he has opted to manufacture truños, in which he appears for a few minutes despite the fact that his face appears on the poster, to pay the bills and maintain his standard of living.