Bruce Willis - Regular Guy Turned Actor 1955-

I do my work as an actor. 1 enjoy trying to entertain people. It’s a good job, now more than ever.
—BRUCE WILLIS

Going across the screen, tough cop Bruce Willis fires a gun at a bunch of bad guys in the action film Die Hard. He’s the same actor who plays a sensitive child psychologist trying to help a young boy who sees dead people in the haunting thriller The Sixth Seme. The characters Willis has portrayed demonstrate his versatility as an actor. It is all the more remarkable because Willis had a terrible stutter until he discovered the magic of being onstage.
The man who would grow up to be a mega—film star was born Walter Bruce Willis on March 19, 1955. His parents, David and Marlene, met while his father was stationed in Germany. They later married, and Walter was born in Idar-Obcrstein, West Germany. When Walter was two, David moved the family back to the States to his hometown of Carney’s Point, New Jersey.
As a youth, Walter spent his free time knocking around with his friends. The guys were typical of the blue-collar environment—loud, tough, tight-knit, and brash. Unfortunately, life at home was not pleasant; Walters parents were having marital problems, and it affected Walter and his younger siblings, Florence, Robert, and David. The difficulties at home may have contributed to Walter’s developing a stutter. He was rather shy until he hit his teen years. Then Waltet made some changes. He dropped his first name and just went by Bruce. To get beyond his stuttering, he became the class clown and resident practical joker at Penns Grove High School. He also participated in some school stage productions.
When Bruce was sixteen, his parents divorced. After finishing high school, Bruce had no real direction for his life. He bounced from one job 10 another, teaching himself how to play the harmonica along the way. Soon he was tending bar at the local clubs, playing music with some bands, and hanging out with his friends.
Bruce might have continued his aimlessness if he hadn’t run into his former high-school Latin teacher, Grace Dilks. She had seen him in some of the school’s productions and thought that despite his speech problem he had great potential as an actor. Dilks convinced Bruce to enroll at Montciair State College, which was known to have a very good performing arts program. After only eighteen months of schooling, the ever-impatient Willis felt he was ready to begin looking fot professional work.
Willis headed off to New York City. When not auditioning, he worked at Cafe Central, where he tended bar and mingled with the clientele. Cafe Central attracted a mix of celebrities and wannabes in the music and acting fields, the perfect place for Willis to make friends and connections in the entertainment itidustry.
During this time Willis began dating Sheri Rivera, an aspiring writer. Sheri asked an actor’s agent to come to sec Willis in Sam Shepards play Fool for Love. The agent was so impressed by Willis’s performance that he signed him as a client. That summer Willis decided to take a trip to Los Angeles (L.A.) to attend the 1984 Olympics. Willis figured while he was out there he could check out some acting opportunities. The trip changed his life.
While in L.A., Willis auditioned for a starring role in a new ABC series titled Moonlighting. More than 3,000 men in a dozen cities had auditioned for the role of cocky, suave private investigator David Addison. It didn’t take long for writer-producer Glenn Gordon Caron to realize Willis was exactly the actor he was looking for.
Moonlighting debuted in the fall of 1985 and took off like a rocket. The edgy love-hate chemistry between Willis and costar Cybil Shepherd’s characters and Willis’s unusual direct discussions with the audience made the show a hit. In the show’s third season Willis earned both a Best Actor Golden Globe and a Best Actor Emmy Award.
When Moonlighting was canceled in 1 990, Willis fell back into his old partying ways. Despite his wild reputation or perhaps because of it, Willis was a much-sought-after actor. In 1987 he had starred opposite Kim Basinger in Blind Date, followed by a funky western called Sunset (1988). It was Williss next film that made him a film star. Cast as New York City police detective John McGlane in the action thriller Die Hard (1988), Willis was paid a phenomenal $5 million dollars. There were a few conditions, however. He had to agree to stop the wild partying while working on the film and start attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
There was also a new woman in Willis’s life—Demi Moore. Moore had already gone through her wild partying days, and became an anchor for Willis, helping him through his own recovery. After dating for just three months, the couple married in November 1987- A lot had happened to Willis in the last half of the 1980s.
Willis and Moore became one of Hollywood’s “power couples.” With other “star” partners, Willis and Moore opened a chain of Planet Hollywood restaurants. In order to raise their kids away from the limelight, Willis and Moore bought a home in Hailey, Idaho. Their first child, Rumer Glenn, was born on August 16, 1988. Two sisters soon followed—Scout Larue on July 20, 1991, and Tallulah Belle on February 3, 1994. Fatherhood means everything to Willis, and he is determined to instill in his own children the love and intimacy that was absent in his own childhood.
During the 1990s Willis and Moore continued to pursue their film careers. Willis reprised his McClane role in Die Hard 2: Die Harder and Die Hard 3: Die Hard with a Vengeance. Not wanting to fall into the typecast action-hero role, Willis took on different types of parts. He was the voice of baby Mikey in Look Who’s Talking; the nerdy doctor in the black comedy Death Becomes Her; a prisoner sent back in time to discover the cause of a deadly virus in 12 Monkeys; and a corrupt boxer in Pulp Fiction.
As he had at the end of the 1980s, Willis found himself riding another career crest when he starred in the 1999 drama-mystery The Sixth Sense. One critic called his performance “a triumph of subtlety.” Once again Willis demonstrated his willingness to take on a different type of role to prove his versatility as an actor. He has shown through his body of work that he can do comedy, play the action hero, and be a serious dramatic actor too.
At age forty-seven Willis shows no signs of losing his box-office appeal. He welcomed in the new millennium with three more fdm hits, Unbreakable, Bandits, and Hart’s War. He also won his second Emmy for his guest role in the TV comedy hit Friends. Though Willis’s career is steady, his personal life has had some downs. In the summer of 1998 Willis and Moore decided to divorce. Nevertheless, Willis has remained close with Moore and his daughters, and they go out as a family as often as possible.
Willis appears finally to have it all together—as an actor, a father, and a grown man. In his own assessment Willis says, “I’m really just a regular guy who has had an incredibly blessed life. Everyday I work at not taking this fame thing seriously.”

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