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Walter Bruce Willis (born March 19, 1955) is an American retired actor. He achieved fame with a leading role on the comedy-drama series Moonlighting (1985–1989) and has appeared in over a hundred films, gaining recognition as an action hero for his portrayal of John McClane in the Die Hard franchise (1988–2013). Willis's other notable credits include The Last Boy Scout (1991), Pulp Fiction (1994), 12 Monkeys (1995), The Fifth Element (1997), Armageddon (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable, The Whole Nine Yards (both 2000), Tears of the Sun (2003), Sin City (2005), The Expendables, Red (both 2010), Looper (2012) and Glass (2019). In the last few years of his career, he starred in many low-budget direct-to-video films, which were poorly received. Willis retired from acting in 2022 due to aphasia. He was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2023. As a singer, Willis released his debut album, The Return of Bruno, in 1987, followed by two more albums in 1989 and 2001. He made his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of Misery in 2015. Willis has received various accolades throughout his career, including a Golden Globe Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and two People's Choice Awards. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006. Films featuring Willis have grossed between US$2.64 billion and US$3.05 billion at North American box offices, making him in 2010 the eighth-highest-grossing leading actor. Early life and education Walter Bruce Willis was born on March 19, 1955, in Idar-Oberstein in what was then West Germany. His mother, Marlene, was German, from Kassel, and his father, David Willis, was an American soldier. He has a younger sister, Florence, and two younger brothers, Robert (deceased) and David. After being discharged from the military in 1957, his father relocated the family to his hometown of Carneys Point, New Jersey. Willis has described his background as a "long line of blue-collar people". His mother worked in a bank and his father was a welder, master mechanic and factory worker. Willis spoke with a stutter. He attended Penns Grove High School in Carneys Point Township, where his schoolmates nicknamed him "Buck-Buck". Willis joined the drama club, and found that acting on stage reduced his stutter. He was eventually elected student council president. He graduated from Penns Grove High School in 1973. After graduating from high school, Willis worked as a security guard at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant and transported crew members at the DuPont Chambers Works factory in Deepwater. He turned to acting after working as a private investigator, a role he would later play in the comedy-drama series Moonlighting and the action-comedy film The Last Boy Scout. Willis enrolled in the drama program at Montclair State University, where he was cast in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He left the school in 1977, and moved to New York City, where he supported himself in the early 1980s as a bartender at Kamikaze, an art bar in Manhattan, while living in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Career 1980s: Moonlighting, Die Hard and rise to fame Willis was cast as David Addison Jr. in the television series Moonlighting (1985–1989), competing against 3,000 other actors for the position. His starring role in Moonlighting, opposite Cybill Shepherd, helped to establish him as a comedic actor. During the show's five seasons, he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy. During the height of the show's success, beverage maker Seagram hired Willis as the pitchman for their Golden Wine Cooler products. The advertising campaign paid Willis US$5–7 million over two years. Willis chose not to renew his contract when he decided to stop drinking alcohol in 1988. In 1987, Willis obtained his first lead role in the Blake Edwards film Blind Date, co-starring with Kim Basinger and John Larroquette. Edwards cast him again to play the real-life cowboy actor Tom Mix in Sunset (1988). The same year, he starred in an action role in Die Hard (1988) as John McClane. He performed most of his own stunts in the film, and the film grossed $138,708,852 worldwide. Following his success with Die Hard, Willis had a leading role in the drama In Country as Vietnam veteran Emmett Smith and also provided the voice for a talking baby in Look Who's Talking (1989) and the sequel Look Who's Talking Too (1990). In the late 1980s, Willis enjoyed moderate success as a recording artist, recording an album of pop-blues, The Return of Bruno, which included the hit single "Respect Yourself" featuring the Pointer Sisters. The LP was promoted by a Spinal Tap–like rockumentary parody featuring scenes of Willis performing at famous events including Woodstock. He released a version of the Drifters song "Under the Boardwalk" as a second single; it reached No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart, but was less successful in the US. Willis returned to the recording studio several times. 1990s: Die Hard sequels, Pulp Fiction and dramatic roles Having acquired major personal success and pop culture influence playing John McClane in Die Hard, Willis reprised his role in the sequels Die Hard 2 (1990) and Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995). These first three installments in the Die Hard series grossed over US$700 million internationally and propelled Willis to the first rank of Hollywood action stars. In the early 1990s, Willis's career suffered a moderate slump, as he starred in flops such as The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and Hudson Hawk (1991), although he did find box office success with The Last Boy Scout. He gained more success with Striking Distance (1993) but flopped again with Color of Night (1994): it was savaged by critics but did well in the home video market and became one of the Top 20 most-rented films in the United States in 1995. Maxim also ranked his sex scene in the film as the best in film history. In 1994, Willis also had a leading role in one part of Quentin Tarantino's acclaimed Pulp Fiction; the film's success gave a boost to his career, and he starred alongside his Look Who's Talking co-star John Travolta. In 1996, he was the executive producer and star of the cartoon Bruno the Kid which featured a CGI representation of himself. That same year, he starred in Mike Judge's animated film Beavis and Butt-head Do America with his then-wife Demi Moore. In the movie, he plays a drunken criminal named "Muddy Grimes", who mistakenly sends Judge's titular characters to kill his wife, Dallas (voiced by Moore). He then played the lead roles in 12 Monkeys (1995) and The Fifth Element (1997). However, by the end of the 1990s his career had fallen into another slump with critically panned films like The Jackal (which despite negative reviews was a box office hit), Mercury Rising, and Breakfast of Champions, as well as the implosion of the production of Broadway Brawler, a debacle salvaged only by .... Discover the Bruce Press popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Bruce Press books.