American actor Bruce Willis pictured on October 11, 2019.
New York – Sixty-seven-year-old American actor Bruce Willis suffers from frontotemporal dementia. According to the AP agency, his family announced it today. Willis, known primarily for his action hero roles, ended his career last March due to aphasia, a disease that affects the ability to speak and understand speech. The actor's family has reported that his condition has since deteriorated.
Advertisement'; }
“Although it is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis in hand. Frontotemporal dementia is a cruel disease that many of us have heard of, and it can affect anyone. There is no cure for it today. , which we hope will make a difference,” the family said in a statement.
The statement was posted by the family on the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD) website and is signed by Willis' wife Emma, ex-wife and actress Demi Moore and the actor's five children .
On its website, AFTD describes frontotemporal dementia as a type of dementia that is the most common type of dementia in people under the age of 60. “While the term 'dementia' is most often associated with memory loss, frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is different: it is much more likely to affect personality, behavior, language and movement, precisely because of the parts of the brain it affects: the frontal and temporal lobes,” the website says AFTD.
People diagnosed with this type of dementia have an average life expectancy of seven to 13 years, according to the association. In the United States, FTD affects between 50,000 and 60,000 people and accounts for about ten percent of all dementia cases. Willis in the cult first part as John McClane in a skyscraper full of terrorists is not the usual invulnerable superman, but a beaten and bleeding guy who sometimes has fear.
In 1999, Willis surprised critics with the role of child psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe in the mysterious Six meaning. However, he did not get a similar role and directors, whether Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction (1994), Terry Gilliam in the science fiction 12 Monkeys (1995), Luc Besson in The Fifth Element (1997) or Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller in Sin City (2005), they mainly cast him as a well-known tough guy.
At the end of his career, Willis became known as the protagonist of low-budget films, for which the organizers of the Golden Raspberry Award, awarded for the worst film achievements of the year, created a special category just for him.
