Bruce Willis' wife Emma Heming Willis shares what struck her before the actor's dementia diagnosis

Bruce Willis' wife, Emma Heming Willis, discusses the early changes she noticed in her husband that led to his diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in his 60s.

“For Bruce, it started with language,” Heming Willis, 46, revealed in a new interview with Town & Country. “He had a severe stutter as a child. He went to college and there was a theater teacher who said, 'I have something that will help you.' Through these lessons, Bruce realized that he could memorize a script and recite it without stuttering. That's what got him into acting.

The Die Hard star added: “Always had a stutter but was good at covering it up.”

When Willis, now 69, began speaking differently, Heming Willis had no idea it was an early sign of a serious health condition.

“When his speech started to change, it seemed to be just part of a stutter, it was just Bruce. I never in a million years thought it would be a form of dementia for someone so young,” she said.

It took several years for Willis to be correctly diagnosed with FTD, Heming Willis said, pointing out that the disease is often “misdiagnosed,” “misunderstood” or “overlooked altogether.”

“I say that FTD whispers, it doesn't scream. It's hard for me to say, 'This is where Bruce ended and this is where his illness began to take over,'” she said.

Willis' family announced in February 2023 that he had been diagnosed with FTD, after he first announced in March 2022 that he was retiring from acting because he was diagnosed with aphasia, a condition that affects a person's ability to act Impaired ability to express and understand written and spoken language.

Heming Willis, who shares daughters Mabel, 12, and Evelyn, 10, with Willis, told Town & Country that the actor's adult daughters from his first marriage to Demi Moore – Rumer, 36, Scout, 33, and Tallulah ( 30) – Having children was part of his care team from the start.

“The family respects the way I look after him; she really supports me,” said Heming Willis. “When I need to vent, when I need to cry, when I need to be angry – because all of that can happen and it's okay to have those feelings – they're always there to listen.”

“I am so grateful that we are this blended family. They’re very supportive, very loving and very helpful, and a lot of people don’t have that.”

Heming Willis' comments about Willis' diagnosis come more than a year after Tallulah Willis recalled noticing the first signs of her father's dementia in an emotional essay for Vogue.

The younger Willis explained that she had suspected something was wrong with her father's health “long before his diagnosis.”

“It started with a kind of vague unresponsiveness that the family attributed to Hollywood hearing loss: 'Say loud!' “Die Hard” messed up Dad’s ears,” she wrote. “Later, the lack of responsiveness increased and sometimes I took it personally. He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he had lost interest in me.”

As Tallulah Willis struggled with her own health issues, which included a diagnosis of borderline personality, ADHD and anorexia nervosa, she realized that her father was also “struggling in silence.”

“There were all sorts of cognitive tests being done, but we didn’t have an acronym yet,” she said.

In the summer of 2021, Tallulah Willis became “painfully” aware that her father’s health was deteriorating. The realization came to her at a wedding on Martha's Vineyard while listening to the bride's father give a speech.

“Suddenly I realized I would never have that moment when my father talked about me as an adult at my wedding. It was devastating,” she remembers. “I left the dining room table, went outside and cried in the bushes.”

Now that she's recovered from her health issues, Tallulah Willis said she's better able to be a source of joy to her famous father. “I can bring a bright and sunny energy to it no matter where I was,” she said.