Bruce Willis’ daughter Tallulah opens up about her father’s illness

Tallulah Willis not only struggles with her ailing father, Bruce Willis, but also with her own demons and diagnoses. The daughter of the movie star now describes this herself in a very personal essay in “Vogue”.

Bruce Willis’ daughter Tallulah opens up about her own illnesses and his dementia

At the beginning she goes far back into the past. She remembers the day, when she was 11, when she found photos of herself on gossip sites on the internet and read the comments about them. “Wow, she looks deformed. Look at her manly chin – she’s like an ugly version of her father. Her mother must be so disappointed,” she recalls of the posts from unknown users. Words that should have a lasting impact on them.

Because, as Willis explains, she was never comfortable with being a teenager, but at the same time she didn’t want to talk about it so as not to draw attention to her family. When she received psychiatric treatment at the age of 20, newspapers reported about it. Today, at the age of 29, she has decided to tell her story herself. About two years ago, Willis, who describes herself as “Nepo Baby” and therefore wants to be careful not to appear as if she were complaining, suffered from anorexia. As she struggled with her health, it became increasingly apparent that something was wrong with her famous father.

“It started with a kind of vague inattention that the family traced back to the hearing loss in Hollywood,” she explains to Vogue. It was thought that working on loud action sets simply got in the way of Willis. “Later on, that unresponsiveness spread, and I sometimes took it personally. He had had two children with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me,” admits the 29-year-old. Again the destructive thoughts from her teenage years crept into her brain: “I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father.”

“The Beginning of Sorrow”

Willis admits that she was too ill herself to pay enough attention to her father’s illness. In her twenties she was diagnosed with depression, then ADHD, anorexia and later borderline personality disorder. “While I was dealing with my body dysmorphia and flaunting it on Instagram, my father struggled in silence,” Willis describes the situation about two years ago. When she attended a wedding in the summer of 2021 where the bride’s father gave a speech, it hit her like a blow. “I suddenly realized that I would never have that moment, that my father would talk about me as an adult at my wedding. It was devastating. I left the dining table, went outside and cried in the bushes,” she describes the breakdown.

Today she accepted that her father is ill. “I know there are challenges ahead, that this is the beginning of grief, but the whole thing of loving yourself before you can love someone else — it’s real,” says Willis. When she’s at her father’s house today, she collects anything that might be important to her when he’s gone. Among other things, she saved her father’s voice messages on a hard drive. She also remembers recently finding a note in his study on which he had written nothing but “Michael Jordan.” She doesn’t know why, but she kept the note anyway.

“I keep going back and forth between the present and the past when I talk about Bruce: he is, he was, he is, he was. It’s because I have hopes in my father that I’m reluctant to give up,” she explains . “It wasn’t easy growing up in such a famous family, and I struggled to find a patch of light in the long shadows cast by my parents. But more and more often, I feel like I’m standing in that light,” he said Tallulah Willis. Today it is particularly important to her to make her father as comfortable as possible.

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