Bruce Willis dementia diagnosis: Daughter Tallulah reveals ‘I knew something was wrong for a long time’
Bruce Willis’s daughter has revealed how he still recognises her and “lights up” when she enters the room, as loved ones come to terms with his dementia diagnosis.
Tallulah Willis laid bare the impact the Hollywood actor’s illness has had on her family in an essay for Vogue Magazine.
The 29-year-old said she knew “something was wrong for a long time” before the family announced the Die Hard star was suffering from aphasia – a condition affecting the brain which causes speech and language difficulties – leading to his retirement.
She later learned aphasia was a feature of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) – which “chips away at his cognition and behaviour day by day”.
The Pulp Fiction actor – who shares daughters Rumer, Tallulah and Scout with ex-wife Demi Moore – was diagnosed with the progressive neurological disorder in February this year.
Willis wrote the article days after the actor’s wife, model Emma Hemming-Willis, with whom he has two daughters, Mabel, 10, and Evelyn, eight, described the “toll” on her mental health and spoke poignantly about how their time together was precious.
“It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss. ‘Speak up! Die Hard messed with Dad’s ears,'” Willis wrote.
Later, the unresponsiveness “broadened”, she added.
“He still knows who I am and lights up when I enter the room.
“He may always know who I am, give or take the occasional bad day. One difference between FTD and Alzeimer’s dementia is that, at least early in the disease, the former is characterized by language and motor deficits, while the latter features more memory loss.
“I keep flipping between the present and the past when I talk about Bruce: he is, he was, he is, he was. That’s because I have hopes for my father that I’m so reluctant to let go of.”
Bruce and Tallulah Willis pictured at the premiere of The Whole Ten Yards in 2004 Pic: Rex
‘My father’s condition hit me painfully’
Willis admitted she has met her father’s decline in recent years with a “share of avoidance and denial that I’m not proud of” – due to various health issues including anorexia nervosa, depression and being diagnosed with ADHD, which led to rapid weight loss and body dysmorphia.
During her own health battles, the actor was “quietly struggling”, she said.
Recalling a moment when her father’s condition “hit me painfully”, she wrote: “I was at a wedding in the summer of 2021 on Martha’s Vineyard, and the bride’s father made a moving speech.
Bruce Willis in 1999
“Suddenly I realized that I would never get that moment, my dad speaking about me in adulthood at my wedding. It was devastating. I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes.”
Last spring, Willis saw her weight drop to about 84 pounds (38.1kg).
“The other night, I lay in bed thinking to myself, with an ache in my heart, what if my dad had been his full self and saw me at that size? What would he have done?
“I’d like to think that he wouldn’t have let it happen.
“Whereas my sisters and my mother have these extensive tool kits – lots of psycho-education and interpersonal skills, my dad has never been so interested in root causes, in close examination.
“Maybe he’s a stereotypical father of a certain generation in that way, a doer who, if he had understood, might have scooped me up and said, ‘This is ending now.’
“His style has always been to plug the leak even if he’s not sure why the leak is happening.
“Certainly there are benefits to examination, but there’s a beauty in his way, and I don’t think I noticed it until he was no longer capable of it.”
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Willis is now focused on recovery and her relationship with her father – whose mobility has not been affected by his condition.
“Every time I go to my dad’s house, I take tons of photos of whatever I see, the state of things. I’m like an archaeologist, searching for treasure in stuff that I never used to pay much attention to.
“I have every voicemail from him saved on a hard drive,” she said.
“I find that I’m trying to document, to build a record for the day when he isn’t there to remind me of him and of us.
“These days, my dad can be reliably found on the first floor of the house, somewhere in the big open plan of the kitchen-dining-living room, or in his office.
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“That office has always been a kind of window into what he’s most interested in at any given moment. Recently I found a scrap of paper there on which he had written, simply, ‘Michael Jordan’. I wish I knew what he was thinking. (In any case, I took it!)
“The room is filled with the nick-nacks he has collected: vintage toy cars, coins, rocks, objects made of brass. He likes things that feel heavy in the hand, that he can spin around in his fingers.”
Last month the actor and Moore became grandparents after Rumer announced the birth of her first child, Louetta Isley Thomas Willis.
A drill rapper turned TikTok wildlife presenter hopes to “bridge the gap” between young people and climate change.
Growing up in Ladbroke Grove, west London, former music star TY was stabbed four times. He had fallen “into nonsense”, he says, but he always wanted something different for his life.
Wildlife and the environment are his real passions. Nowadays, you are more likely to see TY with a boa constrictor clamping on to his arm in the Amazon, or letting a tarantula crawl across his hands.
He tells Sky News he wants to help people “understand the severity of the planet right now”, but the route to his new calling hasn’t exactly been a straightforward path.
“I never had purpose,” the rapper explains. “Three or four years ago, I would not have seen myself in this light… As I fell into wildlife, I found myself again.”
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Collaborations with US wildlife enthusiast Garrett Galvin – aka fishingarrett, one of the biggest wildlife content creators in the world – have certainly helped when it comes to amassing a growing following on social media as TYfromtheWyld.
But TY already had a substantial number of fans from his days as a platinum-selling drill rapper, having found fame as a member of the pioneering rap collective CGM (formerly known as 1011).
Alongside rapper Digga D, he made headlines when police caught the pair and three others in possession of machetes and baseball bats in 2017.
They ended up being given one of the UK’s very first music criminal behaviour orders, with the police arguing their songs incited violence – a move which triggered a debate about art censorship.
‘I never saw anyone that looked and thought like me’
“It’s a rough area, Ladbroke Grove, where I’m from,” says TY. “Crime started happening, I started getting into nonsense on the roads and as a young kid growing up you can get easily influenced by some stuff, so I kind of was lost for a while.
“Music was never my passion, I just fell into it. I grew up watching [TV naturalists and conservationists] Steve Backshall, Steve Irwin, but that world was so distant for me. I never saw anyone that looked and thought like me.
“Now I want to represent and be an inspiration for young people.”
Pic: @tyfromthewyld
Rapper AJ Tracey, who grew up in the same area of London as TY, says people need to understand that it’s all too easy to drift down the wrong path.
“What a lot of people don’t realise is that people aren’t choosing to be in the situation that they are… anyone who wants to change their life and do something positive 100% deserves a second chance, honestly, probably even a third or fourth chance, because we’re all humans and we make mistakes.”
Just don’t expect Tracey to be making an appearance in any of TY’s videos anytime soon.
“He’s with some dangerous animals,” he laughs. “I don’t know about that, I’m scared!”
Pic: @tyfromthewyld
On a more serious note, Tracey says successive British governments could learn from TY’s skills at engaging with young people.
“I feel like when the country’s making budget cuts, it’s the youth that miss out all the time… the people in power have got to really pull some things together.”
While there might not seem an obvious crossover between drill music and learning about the ecosystem, TY’s success clearly demonstrates that an audience is there.
“We’re not doing enough to help,” he says. “This is my mission, to save animals, save the world, and get as many people on board as I can.
“Maybe a guy like me, from a certain background, will just kick a lot of people up to just say, ‘Yo. He’s doing something’.”
Entertainment
Gene Hackman’s wife died from rare infectious disease around a week before actor’s death, medical investigator says
Gene Hackman’s wife died from a rare infectious disease around a week before the actor died, medical investigators have said.
The couple were found dead in their New Mexico home on 26 February, along with one of their pet dogs. Police have previously said there were no apparent signs of foul play.
At a press conference on Friday, chief medical investigator for New Mexico, doctor Heather Jarrell, gave an update on the results of post-mortem investigations carried out following their deaths.
Doctor Jarrell said Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, died from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare infectious disease. There were no signs of trauma and the death was a result of natural causes, she said.
Actor Gene Hackman with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, pictured in 2003. Pic: AP
The doctor said Arakawa likely died on 11 February, the date she was last known to have communicated with people via email.
She said Hackman had advanced Alzheimer’s and died from heart disease, with data from his pacemaker last registering on 18 February.
Due to his Alzheimer’s, “it’s quite possible he was not aware that [his wife] was deceased,” Dr Jarrell added.
The actor tested negative for hantavirus, a rare disease spread by infected rodent droppings.
Gene Hackman in 1999. Pic: AP
Humans can contract hantavirus by breathing in contaminated air, and symptoms can start as soon as one week, or as long as eight weeks, later. It is not transmissible from person to person.
There were just seven confirmed cases of hantavirus in New Mexico last year, and Arakawa is the only person confirmed to have contracted it in the state in 2025. Between 1975 and 2023, New Mexico recorded a total of 129 hantavirus cases, with 52 deaths.
Santa Fe County sheriff Adan Mendoza said authorities are still waiting for data from mobile phones found at the property, but it is “very unlikely they are going to show anything else”.
“There’s no indication” that Hackman used a mobile phone or any other technology to communicate and the couple lived a very private life before their deaths, he added.
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Bill Murray’s tribute to Gene Hackman
The cause of the couple’s dog’s death has not been confirmed but it is now known that Arakawa had picked the animal up from the vet, where it had undergone a procedure, on 9 February.
The procedure “may explain why [the dog] was in a crate at the residence” while two surviving dogs were found roaming the property, Mr Mendoza said.
Hackman, who was widely respected as one of the greatest actors of his generation, was a five-time Oscar nominee who won the best actor in a leading role for The French Connection in 1972 and best actor in a supporting role for Unforgiven two decades later.
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Morgan Freeman paying tribute to Gene Hackman at the Oscars. Pic: AP/Chris Pizzello
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He met Arakawa, a concert pianist, in the mid-1980s and the pair married in 1991.
Brian James, founding member of The Damned, has died aged 70.
The guitarist, who was part of the group’s original line-up, wrote the first UK punk single New Rose and helped the band create their debut album, 1977’s Damned Damned Damned.
A spokesperson for record label Easy Action said: “I can confirm that Brian passed away peacefully yesterday with his family present.”
The Damned in 1978. Pic: Sheila Rock/Shutterstock
James’ fellow band member, bassist Raymond “Captain Sensible” Burns, said in an Instagram post: “The riffmeister, Brian has gone – that final act that happens to us all, for most is a sad and miserable affair but while it’s truly awful our mate has been taken I prefer to celebrate the life… and what a life Brian James had.”
He added: “And looking back I have to say what an absolute gent Brian was… despite having to occasionally endure some pretty appalling behaviour by yours truly he never once lost it with me – and whenever we met over the following decades we would have a drink and a bloody good laugh.”
A statement on James’ Facebook page said he was “one of the true pioneers of music, guitarist, songwriter, and true gentleman” and a musician who was “incessantly creative and a musical tour de force” over his long career.
It said: “With his wife Minna, son Charlie, and daughter-in-law Alicia by his side, Brian passed peacefully on Thursday 6 March 2025.”
The Damned supported the Sex Pistols on their Anarchy Tour of the UK and went on to play with T Rex on Marc Bolan’s final tour before he died.
James left the band after it released its second album, Music For Pleasure, and was part of the short-lived Tanz Der Youth before he formed The Lords Of The New Church with American singer Stiv Bators and drummer Nick Turner.
The band released the songs Open Your Eyes, Dance With Me and Method To My Madness.
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James went on to work with The Dripping Lips, create his own band the Brian James Gang, and release solo albums.
In 2020 he and The Damned lead singer Dave Vanian, drummer Christopher “Rat Scabies” Millar and Burns announced the band would reform more than four decades after it began in 1976.
James performed with the group in 2022.
Burns said: “When BJ, Rat, DV and myself got back together for The Damned originals shows it was magical in all sorts of ways… that we were chums again of course but also the way we managed to recreate our ’76 garage punk sound right from the first chord in rehearsals.
“We were all up for doing it again too… but that’ll never happen now, sadly.”
The band’s set in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Friday would be dedicated to James, he added, “without whom The Damned would never ever have happened”.
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