Hollywood star Bruce Willis’ wife, Emma Heming Willis, has defended her decision to move the much-loved actor into a second home following his devastating dementia diagnosis
Bruce Willis’ wife broke down in tears as she explained why she moved the Hollywood star out of their family home earlier this year. The father-of-five, 70, who shares two daughters with Emma Heming Willis, 47, is battling frontotemporal dementia (FTD), which affects language and personality as well as causing gradual cognitive decline.
Emma has been by her husband’s side since he was diagnosed in 2022. However, in August, she made the heartbreaking decision to move Bruce into a second home, which is close to the family’s main residence, so that he can be looked after by carers 24/7.
Revealing she had faced criticism for making the ‘hardest decision’, Emma fought back tears at the End Well 2025 conference last month, as she opened up about the scrutiny both she and fellow caregivers were under.
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Insisting she was faced with an “impossible” decision regarding Bruce’s living arrangements, she admitted: “This is not how I envisioned our life.
“These are hard decisions. These are impossible – I’m getting choked up thinking about it. They’re impossible decisions. This is not how I envisioned our life,’ she explained.
“So I had to make the best and safest decision for our family and and I knew by being honest and open about it that it would be met with a lot of judgement. And what’s interesting about it is that the judgement comes from the outside, it doesn’t come from our family.”
Despite making the agonising decision, Emma says her family is now thriving, inisisting that: “the world has completed opened up” for both Bruce and their daughters.
She said: “This is the best decision for our family. It was the safest one and our family is now in essence thriving.
“People don’t realise all the needs that go unmet behind closed doors and now our children’s needs are met.
“They are in a home where they can have play dates and sleepovers, these things that we don’t even think about. Their world is completely opened up and so has my husband’s.”
Bruce’s blended family, which includes his ex-wife Demi Moore, and their daughters Rumer, 37, Scout, 34, and Tallulah, 31 – publicly announced that he’d been diagnosed with FTD in 2023.
His daughters with Demi occasionally update fans on their dad’s progress, with Rumer recently revealing that Bruce often cannot recognise her, but she hoped he could still feel her love.
Taking to Instagram, sharing a snap of the pair, she wrote: “I’m so grateful that when I go over there, and I give him a hug, whether he recognises me or not, that he can feel the love I’ve given him, and I can feel it back from him. That I still see a spark of him, and he can feel the love that I’m giving.”
* If you have been affected by this story, information and advice can be found at Dementia UK.
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