BRUCE WILLIS. The actor is ending his career due to health problems. Bruce Willis suffers from aphasia, a disease that causes language disorders.
It’s over, we will no longer see Bruce Willis in the cinema. His relatives announced on social networks on March 30, 2022, that he was ending his acting career. The American star, popular since Crystal Trap, Pulp Fiction Where The Sixth Sense suffers from aphasia, a disease that causes communication disorders, which can lead to difficulties in understanding, reading, writing, or speaking.
The state of health of Bruce Willis, however, has not been further clarified by his relatives, so we do not know the cause of his illness. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood has been worried about his condition for several years. Director Mike Burns, who directed the 67-year-old actor in Race against death in 2021, quickly realized “there was a big problem, and [il a]understand why we [lui] had asked to shorten his text”. According to several industry professionals, Bruce Willis had difficulty remembering his lines, he seemed disoriented and saw his text, and his presence on the film sets was reduced to the maximum.
In recent years, the career of Bruce Willis, a figure in action and science fiction cinema, seemed to be in decline. He only appeared in highly criticized and caricatural films, so an entire category was dedicated to him at the Razzie Awards. Thursday, the organizers of this award announced that they were withdrawing it after learning of the illness from which the actor suffers. The comedian with an impressive career in the 1990s and 2000s (Armageddon, The Fifth Element, The Die Hards, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable…) had not appeared on the red carpets since October 11, 2019. His ex-wife Demi Moore had however posted a photo with her ex-husband on Instagram, for his birthday on March 20, only ten days before his family announces his illness (aphasia) and his retirement on social networks. However, the comedian from Die Hard and Pulp Fiction had not appeared on the red carpets since October 11, 2019.
Aphasia, Kazuko? It is a communication disorder. This can manifest itself both in expression, but also in understanding, whether oral or written. As a result, Bruce Willis may have already seen his oral language, his reading, his gestures, or his writing be disturbed. For an actor, as for anyone, aphasia is a real handicap in everyday life. Orally, according to the Service de Neuropsychologie et de neuro-réhabilitation de Lausanne, aphasia can be characterized by the frequent use of one word by another, such as talking about “glasses” instead of “watch”, or its opposite, we will speak of hot to evoke cold. A partial distortion of words, even total in the most serious cases, and the production of sentences in telegraphic style is also a consequence of aphasia.
How do you become aphasic? At the origin of this evil, there is “a lesion of the specific areas of language, which are located in the brain”. In short, summarizes the CHUV, “anyone suffering from brain damage, with some acquisition of language, can become aphasic”. The origin of the lesion can be explained by a vascular accident, an injury, or a pathological foreign mass, such as a tumor.
Can aphasia be cured? Unfortunately, this depends on several factors. The actor Bruce Willis will thus not be able to recover if the lesion at the origin of his aphasia is too extensive. Other factors to take into account: the age of the patient, but also the cause of the lesion, or the presence or absence of associated disorders.
Bruce Willis’ family did not elaborate on what caused the actor’s aphasia. Nevertheless, it is known that aphasia is often the result of a sudden health accident, such as a stroke (cerebrovascular accident), head trauma, or a degenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s. It is not known, for the time being, what caused this deterioration in the state of health of the American star of 67 years.