Bruce Willis’ dementia diagnosis: ‘language is going’, says actor’s wife

Emma Heming Willis and Bruce Willis in 2015. Heming Willis has spoken of her husband’s current condition after his diagnosis with aphasia and frontotemporal dementia. Photograph: Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

Bruce Willis’s brain is “failing him” and his “language is going”, his wife, Emma Heming Willis, has revealed, more than two years since the actor was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

“Bruce is still very mobile. Bruce is in really great health overall, you know,” Heming Willis told Diane Sawyer in an ABC special on Tuesday. “It’s just his brain that is failing him. The language is going. We’ve learned to adapt and we have a way of communicating with him, which is just a different way.”