Bruce Willis’ Early Dementia Symptoms Dismissed as ‘Just a Part of a Stutter’ He’d Had Since Childhood

Bruce Willis’ early dementia symptoms were dismissed as a return of his childhood stutter, his wife Emma Heming Willis said.

“Bruce has always had a stutter, but he has been good at covering it up,”  Heming Willis, 46, told Town & Country about the initial signs of the actor’s frontotemporal dementia. 

His dementia symptoms, she said, “started with language.” 

“For Bruce, it started in his temporal lobes and then has spread to the frontal part of his brain. It attacks and destroys a person’s ability to walk, think, make decisions,” she explained.

“As his language started changing, it [seemed like it] was just a part of a stutter, it was just Bruce,” Heming Willis told the outlet. “Never in a million years would I think it would be a form of dementia for someone so young.”

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is an all-encompassing term for a group of diseases that impact the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes — the areas associated with personality, behavior and language — Mayo Clinic explains.

Aphasia, a disorder that impacts your ability to speak — which Willis was initially diagnosed with — can be a symptom of FTD.

As Heming Willis explained, “I say that FTD whispers, it doesn’t shout. It’s hard for me to say, ‘This is where Bruce ended, and this is where his disease started to take over.’ He was diagnosed two years ago, but a year prior, we had a loose diagnosis of aphasia, which is a symptom of a disease but is not the disease.”

The Die Hard actor’s stutter, she shared, is what initially prompted Willis, now 69, to pursue acting.

“He had a severe stutter as a child,” Heming Willis shared. “He went to college and there was a theater teacher who said, ‘I’ve got something that’s going to help you.’ From that class, Bruce realized that he could memorize a script and be able to say it without stuttering. That’s what propelled him into acting.” 

These days, Heming Willis said she’s “much better than I was when we first received the FTD diagnosis.”

“We had so many plans, so many beautiful things we wanted to do with our girls, so many things that we wanted to experience together. You just rip that page out completely, and then how do you rewrite the story? I’m learning how to take some control back. It might not be the most beautiful story I could have thought of, but there are cracks of light.”