Emma Heming, Bruce Willis’ wife, revealed why she and family disregarded the actor’s initial symptoms of dementia.
In an interview with Town & Country on Tuesday, October 29, Heming got candid on how and why the family oversaw some of the actor’s symptoms at first, keeping in mind the history of him having a stutter since childhood.
“Bruce has always had a stutter, but he has been good at covering it up,” Heming, 46, told the outlet.
The British model and actress shared that it was Willis’ stutter that ultimately led him to become an actor, after a theatre teacher in his college told him that his stutter would go away if he memorised the script.
“As his language started changing, it [seemed like it] was just a part of a stutter, it was just Bruce,” Heming explained. “Never in a million years would I think it would be a form of dementia for someone so young.”
She continued, “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.”
Adding, “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 69-year-old Sixth Sense actor’s aphasia diagnosis was shared by his family in 2022.
