Actor Bruce Willis celebrated his 68th birthday this Sunday, March 19. And he celebrated it surrounded by his loved ones. That peculiar and extensive family that includes his wife, Emma Heming Willis, 44, with whom he has two daughters, Mabel Ray Willis, 10, and Evelyn Penn Willis, 8; and also his ex-wife, actress Demi Moore, with whom the interpreter has an excellent relationship and shares three daughters; Rumer Willis, 34, Scout Willis, 31, and Tallulah Willis, 29.
It was precisely Demi Moore who uploaded on her Instagram account, where she has almost four million followers, a video of the celebration in which her family sings to her Happy Birthday: “Happy birthday, BW! I am so glad to be able to celebrate you today. I love you and I love our family. Thank you all for the love and warm wishes, we are all sorry,” she wrote. In the video, Bruce Willis can be seen smiling and raising his fist in the air as his family cheers. Afterward, he blows out the candles on his birthday cake to words of endearment and applause, followed by a chorus of “Hip-hip hooray!”
This is the first birthday of the Hollywood star since he made public in mid-February that he has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a disease for which “there are no treatments”, as the family reported in a statement, adding as a wish that this was “a reality that we hope will change in the coming years.” The family called frontotemporal dementia a “cruel” ailment that is unknown to many. This, they indicated, is more frequent in people under 60 years of age and appears in between 10% and 20% of all diagnoses linked to dementia. “We hope that the media can pay more attention and focus on publicizing this disease, which needs to be further investigated,” they said in the statement.
The same morning as Willis’s birthday, it was the artist’s wife, Emma Heming, who shared an emotional message on her social networks in which she acknowledged that she had started the day crying, as fans could tell by her still irritated eyes and stuffy nose. : “I think it is important that you see all the faces of this. I always get messages saying ‘You’re so strong!’ or ‘I couldn’t do it’. The reality is that they gave me no choice. I couldn’t do anything but stay strong for both Bruce and our two daughters.”
Heming, British born in Malta, married the actor in 2009 and has now become the family spokesperson. It is not the first time that she has used her social networks to reassure her fans about Willis’ state of health or to appeal to the paparazzi to beg them to stop persecuting her husband, since for a person with dementia that persecution It can create confusion and destabilize you. On this occasion, she also wanted to be honest about the difficulty of living with this disease: “I have moments of sadness, every day. I grieve every day, and that’s really what I’m feeling today on his birthday.” The positive side, Heming acknowledges in the video, is “the warmth and love directed at my husband and our family.” Ella Heming assures that she reads her messages of affection and that helps her better understand her husband’s illness and be able to continue.
Scout Willis, the middle daughter of what was one of the most beloved Hollywood couples of the 1990s, has also posted an emotional photograph on her Instagram. In the image, she appears as a girl with her father, and is accompanied by a message in which she also recounts the difficult moments that the entire family is experiencing after the diagnosis: “Happy birthday to one of my best friends, King Pisces, the master of duality, both the action hero icon and the father of a girl. What a privilege to have this man as my father and learn so much about life, joy, mischief and art through him.” And she adds: “Today is not necessarily an easy day, because it is a day filled with very deep love, and our pain really shows us the depth of our love for someone. Mourning is a price that I will always pay to know what it is to feel so much love. I love you”.
“Congratulations, dad. I love you to the moon. You’re great”. With this brief message, and accompanied by a childhood image of him with his father as a prelude to the same video of the Happy Birthday Shared by his mother, Rumer took the opportunity to make that public declaration of love for his father. The eldest daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore will make them grandparents for the first time in a few months. Her third daughter, Tallulah, also wanted to pay tribute to her father both on social networks and at her celebration, in which she did not hesitate to wear a t-shirt stamped with the face of Bruce Willis.
