Broken engagement. Opposing gender roles. A shocking memoir. A heartbreaking diagnosis.
Their marriage may have ended years ago, but Bruce Willis and Demi Moore
still have one of the most fascinating celebrity relationships ever.
When Demi Moore met Bruce Willis in 1987, she'd already been married and divorced. And she was
even engaged to someone else at the time: fellow actor Emilio Estevez. In fact, Moore and Willis
reportedly first crossed paths while attending the premiere of Estevez's movie Stakeout.
At the time, Willis was starring on the ABC show Moonlighting, while Moore was famous for movies
like St. Elmo's Fire and About Last Night… On the night of the Stakeout premiere, he wooed
her with his impressive bartending skills. As she revealed in her 2019 memoir Inside Out,
"Bruce was looking at me a lot as he went through his bar moves.
He was so attentive as the evening progressed."
Estevez noticed Willis' flirtations and then, as Moore recalled, he commented to her,
"He's all over you, like a cheap suit in the rain."
By the end of the evening, Willis was serious about getting to know Moore
some more. He walked her to her car, they exchanged numbers, and the rest is history.
Just four months after they started dating, Moore and Willis tied the knot in November 1987.
The decision to get hitched was a spontaneous one. As Moore once recalled,
"We got married in Las Vegas [but] we went there to see a boxing match ... We
had sort of talked about [getting married] laughingly and it just seemed O.K. ... It just
seemed like [waiting] didn't matter, that we loved each other so much."
One month after eloping, the couple had another wedding ceremony,
but this time in the presence of their loved ones, as well as a very famous singer: Little Richard,
who officiated the marriage. Things continued to move fast, as Moore became pregnant a month later.
On August 16, 1988, their first child, Rumer, was born. The family would continue to grow in the
years to come, as two more daughters, Scout and Tallulah, arrived in 1991 and 1994, respectively.
Even as her family was growing, Demi Moore always wanted to continue her acting career. She starred
in several acclaimed films in the 90s, including Ghost and A Few Good Men. Alas, this proved to be
a point of contention with her husband. At the time, she was one of the highest-paid female
actors in Hollywood. By 1996, she was earning $12 million for her role in Striptease, the
biggest ever payday for an actress at the time. Willis was also doing pretty well for himself,
as he was reportedly earning at least $14 million per movie in the latter half of the decade.
"You don't mind, do you?"
While Moore saw no issue with this work-life balance,
Willis wanted her to be a stay-at-home mom. She recalled one instance in her memoir when
he wasn't exactly supportive after she was offered a big role. As he told her,
"This will never work if you're off shooting a film."
And as Moore then elaborated,
"What he meant was that our life wouldn't work if I was engrossed in something outside
of our family. I felt panic mounting. I felt way too much anxiety to have a real
conversation with Bruce about our assumptions regarding work, gender roles, and parenting."
Unsurprisingly, these conflicting ideas put significant strain on their marriage.
When Moore and Willis first got together, he was notorious for his
reputed womanizing and party boy ways. In a 1988 interview with The Washington Post,
he addressed whether or not this had impacted his romance with Moore. As he put it,
"She was even more hesitant about it. I guess part of it had to do
with my reputation. Not that she had read anything specifically about me.
Just the kind of buzz that I was, just in very general terms, this wild guy."
"There's a story, and I don't know if it's just a legend, that you lived with
two women. You lived with two women at the same time. Is that true?"
"It is true. You heard that story, huh?" "Yeah, yeah."
Moore eventually suspected that Willis wasn't completely faithful.
As she reflected in her memoir,
"When he left to film Hudson Hawk, things were in a very precarious state. I went over to visit
once, and, frankly, I had the feeling that he had screwed around. It was tense, and it was weird."
As Moore further revealed, Willis even told her at one point that he wasn't sure if he wanted
to be married. It also didn't help that he would talk openly about his opinions on the institution.
As he mused to Playboy in 1996,
"What is marriage? No woman is going to satisfy a man's natural impulse to procreate,
procreate, procreate. The impulse doesn't go away because you have three or ten or a hundred kids."
Both Demi Moore and Bruce Willis were incredibly busy throughout the 90s,
which created significant distance between the two of them. She was starring in the likes of The
Scarlet Letter, Striptease, and G.I. Jane, while he was just as visible in Pulp Fiction, Die Hard
with a Vengeance, and The Fifth Element, just to name a few. With all this time spent apart,
it's not hard to see how being away for months at a time could turn spouses into strangers.
Moore and Willis' differences ultimately proved to be too much for their relationship to bear,
and in June 1998 they officially announced their separation.
At the time, a producer on one of Moore's films claimed to People Magazine,
"They have had problems for at least two years."
And as a friend of Willis' divulged to the New York Post,
"They spent too much time away from each other, and they were leading separate lives."
On October 18, 2000, Moore and Willis jointly filed for divorce,
and it was finalized the same day.
As if the end of her marriage wasn't enough, Demi Moore also had to deal with
her mother's terminal illness at the same time. Throughout her life, Moore had had a strained
relationship with her mom Virginia. When she was just a child, she experienced significant
hardships from being around her mother, from frequent moves to exposure to her alcoholism.
And when she was 15, she was even raped by a man in an arrangement allegedly made by Virginia.
"I don't think it was a straightforward transaction, but she still did
give him the access."
Before Viriginia passed away at the age of 54 in July 1998, Moore managed to make peace
with her estranged mother. Moore reportedly moved her whole family to a New Mexico motel
so that they could all be together during the end. Virginia ultimately succumbed to a
brain tumor after a struggle with cancer. Moore's publicist Pat Kingsley told the press at the time,
"It was a long vigil. She was there with her children."
Demi Moore and Bruce Willis' separation could've torn their entire family apart,
but to prevent that, they both made a conscious effort to prioritize their
children and remain civil through it all. As Willis noted to Rolling Stone in 2000,
"We're very close. We have three children whom we will continue to raise together,
and we're probably as close now as we ever were. We realize we have a
lifelong commitment to our kids. Our friendship continues. The institution has been set aside."
The kids have praised their parents for their handling of the divorce and their co-parenting.
As Rumer Willis explained during a 2015 interview with Larry King,
"I never had to split up vacations or split up birthdays. They always made an effort to do all
of the family events still together and made such an effort to still have our family be as one unit,
as opposed to two separate things, which I think really made an impact."
"They're terrific people." "They are."
"And you remain very close to them, I-" "I do."
Furthermore, Moore wrote in her memoir that she was proud of the divorce
and noted that their connection only grew strong after their separation.
After their split, Moore and Willis both went back onto the dating scene and sparked some new
romances. Moore quite famously dated and then married That '70s Show star Ashton Kutcher in
2005, although they eventually split in 2011 and finalized their divorce in 2013.
Meanwhile, Willis met model-actor Emma Heming in 2005,
and they started dating in 2007. Considering their amicable divorce, it's perhaps no surprise that
Moore and Willis have embraced each other's new partners. As he put it to W Magazine in 2009,
"We've become like a tribe [...] Demi and I made a choice to put the kids first,
and we're really lucky that it turns out we all have fun together.
I still love her, and I have a lot of respect for how she lives her life."
Willis married Heming in 2009 in the presence of friends and family,
which included Moore. That makes sense, as he'd also previously attended her wedding to Kutcher.
When Willis and Heming renewed their vows for their 10th wedding anniversary in 2019,
Heming admitted that they couldn't have done it without Moore present. As she told Us Weekly,
"I have so much respect for her [...] It was important for her to be there. She
was at our first wedding. I loved having her there again. I wouldn't do it without her."
When the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe in early 2020,
everyone was affected in one way or another. As for Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, they ended up
quarantining together with their three daughters. This stirred up a lot of questions from the
public, but Scout Willis offered some insight. As she revealed to the Dopey podcast that April,
"My stepmom was supposed to come up here with my little sisters [...] but my younger sister,
who is about to be 7 years old, [was] at a park,
had never gotten the talk about not [playing] with hypodermic needles that she found,
so she actually tried to poke her shoe with it, and poked her foot."
So while Willis's wife Emma Heming initially stayed behind in Los Angeles with their younger
children, he headed to Hailey, Idaho to be with his older kids and ex-wife.
The family, especially Moore, ended up documenting their time quarantining together
on social media. As she explained during a February 2021 interview with Naomi Campbell:
"I personally feel like I was really grateful for things slowing down and the time that we had."
Over the years, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis have stood by each other through thick and thin.
So it was hardly a surprise that they once again displayed a united front during some especially
tragic news. On March 30, 2022, Moore and her daughters, as well as Willis' wife Emma Heming,
revealed on Instagram that Willis had been diagnosed with aphasia,
a disorder that affects cognitive abilities. Moore further explained,
"As a result of this and with much consideration
Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him."
As explained by Johns Hopkins Medicine:
"Aphasia is a language disorder caused by damage in a specific
area of the brain that controls language expression and comprehension.
[It] leaves a person unable to communicate effectively with others."
Signs of Willis dealing with this condition were reportedly apparent in the previous few years,
with directors of several of his movies either cutting down the length of his scripts,
condensing his work into one or two days, or giving him his lines via an earpiece.
As the news broke of his diagnosis, Willis and his family received an outpouring of love from people
all over the world. Former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who began experiencing aphasia
herself after surviving an assassination attempt in 2012, tweeted her support, as she wrote,
"I'm thinking of Bruce Willis and his family today.
Aphasia makes it hard for me to find the right words. It can be lonely and
isolating [...] To everyone living with aphasia, I'm here for you. We got this."
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