Bruce Willis: Wife Emma gives tearful update about actor's dementia diagnosis

Emma Heming Willis, wife of Bruce Willis, has said that it is “hard to know” if the actor is fully aware of his condition – frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

His daughter Rumer Willis announced in a post to Instagram earlier in the year that the 68-year-old actor, known for his roles in Die Hard and The Sixth Sense, had been diagnosed with the condition.

FTD is an umbrella term for a group of dementias which mainly affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, which are responsible for such things as personality, behaviour, language and speech, according to Dementia UK.

Giving an update on her husband’s condition to NBC’s Today programme in the USA, Emma said: “What I’m learning is that dementia is hard. It’s hard on the person diagnosed, it’s also hard on the family and that is no different for Bruce or myself or our girls and when they say that this is a family disease, it really is.”

Discussing what it was like to come to terms with his diagnosis, she said: “I think it was the blessing and the curse, to sort of finally understand what was happening, so that I can be into the acceptance of what is.

“It doesn’t make it any less painful, but… just being in the know of what is happening to Bruce just makes it a little bit easier.”

When asked if her husband knows what is going on and if his condition is something he is aware of, she said: “Hard to know, it’s hard to know.”

In March 2022, Rumer Willis had shared on Instagram that her father had been diagnosed with aphasia, a disorder that affects communication abilities.

She provided an update in 2023 which explained he had received a “more specific” diagnosis of FTD. In the post about aphasia from 2022, Rumer also revealed her father would be “stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him”.