Bruce Willis' girls saw 'declining' health before dementia diagnosis

Bruce Willis' wife Emma Heming Willis is opening up about how an early stutter he suffered from may have covered up the initial symptoms of his frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

In a new interview with Town & Country, Emma revealed that the 69-year-old movie icon had difficulty speaking early in his cognitive decline, but she initially took that to be a recurrence of the 'severe stutter' that he had dealt with throughout his teen years.

In 2022, she and the rest of his family announced that he had been diagnosed with aphasia and would be retiring from acting.

The following year, the family announced that the Pulp Fiction actor had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, of which aphasia is a common symptom.

'For Bruce, it started with language,' the 46-year-old model explained in her interview, which was published Tuesday.

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She said that his childhood had been marred by his 'severe stutter,' until a college theatre professor opened up a new world of opportunities to him.

While studying acting, Bruce learned that the stutter that was so prominent in his own speech would almost magically disappear whenever he spoke words he had memorized from a script.

'That’s what propelled him into acting,' Emma said.

She added that he continued to deal with the stutter throughout his life, though he developed the ability to cover it up well in most situations.

However, that persistent stutter made it difficult for her to realize that something was seriously wrong with her husband's language abilities in the early stages of his decline.

'As his language started changing, it [seemed like it] was just a part of a stutter, it was just Bruce,' she shared. 'Never in a million years would I think it would be a form of dementia for someone so young.'

In John Parker's Bruce Willis: The Unauthorized Biography, from 1997, the Die Hard actor was quoted as saying, 'I could hardly talk. It took me three minutes to complete a sentence,' via the Los Angeles Times. 'Yet, when I became another character, in a play, I lost the stutter. It was phenomenal.'

Bruce was honored for his advocacy on behalf of those living with stutters at the American Institute for Stuttering's 2016 gala.

He was joined by a fellow stutterer, then-Vice President Joe Biden, while his wife Emma honored him at the ceremony.

In his acceptance speech, the actor revealed that he began exhibiting a stutter around age six, and he said he had 'no plan, no help,' and was 'just flailing wildly for a really long time,' according to The Hollywood Reporter.

After his acting epiphany, Willis worked with speech therapists to further suppress his stutter while attending Montclair State University in New Jersey.

In the same Town & Country interview, Emma revealed that her and Bruce's two young daughters — Mabel, 12, and Evelyn, 10 — began to notice signs of his cognitive decline before he was officially diagnosed with dementia.

'I’ve never tried to sugarcoat anything for them,' she said. 'They’ve grown up with Bruce declining over the years. I’m not trying to shield them from it.'

According to her, honesty was an essential component for helping her daughters cope with their father's deteriorating condition.

'What I learned from our therapist was that if children ask questions, they’re ready to know the answer,' she shared.

Bruce's diagnosis is terminal, with no hope of a recovery or significant improvement, but Emma didn't admit that she was hesitant to underline that fact with her daughters.

'If we could see that Bruce was struggling, I would address it with the kids so they could understand, but this disease is chronic, progressive, and terminal. There is no cure,' she said. 'Obviously, I don’t like to speak about the terminal side of this with them, nor have they asked.'

She added on a somber note: 'They know that Daddy’s not going to get better.'

Despite her daughters' awareness of their father's symptoms, Emma struggled to nail down exactly when he began suffering from FTD, due to the subtle and gradual accumulation of symptoms.

'I say that FTD whispers, it doesn’t shout,' she said, before explaining, 'It’s hard for me to say, "This is where Bruce ended, and this is where his disease started to take over."'