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THOUGH he's
never exactly fit the Ah-nuld-and-Sly
action hero paradigm muscle-bound, monosyllabic,
minimally emotive explosions and
man-on-the-run heroics have been the
stock in trade of actor Bruce Willis ever since he
roared to the top of the Hollywood A-list as John
McClane, the reluctant Everyman protagonist of 1988's
Die Hard. Several seasons of sleuthing and sexual
sparring with Cybil Shepherd on ABC's
Moonlighting made the blue-collar Jersey native a
celebrity, but his testosterone-supercharged
cinematic oeuvre and his 11-year marriage to onetime
Brat Packer Demi
Moore made him an honest-to-Pete
superstar. His willingness to dodge bullets and crack
wise in the face of sneering super-villains has
revived his career more than once, but the
stage-trained Willis has also bounced back on
occasion with powerful performances in more
high-minded fare, demonstrating a versatility that
sets him apart from his pyrotechnic peers.
An Army brat and the eldest of four children, Willis
was born on a military base in Idar-Oberstein, Germany.
His father was discharged in 1957, and he took the
family back to the States, where they settled in Carneys
Point, N.J., so dad could take work at the Camden
Shipyard. Rambunctious and cheerfully extroverted
throughout his teenage years, Willis attended high
school in nearby Penns Grove, where he was elected
student council president and was active in various
drama clubs. He ended up expelled for three months
midway through his senior year as a result of his
involvement in what he later characterized as "the
annual riot, the black-white
anti-human-relations fest." Plagued by a
severe stutter since childhood, the ever-antic
youth eventually tamed his tongue through acting, after
discovering that he could enunciate clearly and calmly
whenever he was playing to an audience.
Instead of doing the university thing straight out of
high school, Willis found full-time work transporting
work crews at the Du Pont factory down the road in
Deepwaters. An industrial accident that claimed the life
of a fellow driver prompted him to rethink his
commitment to the blue-collar life, and he quit his job
shortly thereafter. Directionless and not particularly
driven, the former factory worker spent several months
hanging out in bars and fostered his love of the blues
by playing harmonica for a local R&B outfit called
Loose Goose. He eventually took work as a security guard
at the construction site for a large nuclear plant.
Willis' long-dormant interest in theater eventually
led him to Montclair State College, where he immersed
himself in the locally reputed drama program. While at
Montclair, he made a splash as Brick in a school
production of the Tennessee Williams classic Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof, and frequently skipped his classes to
jaunt to New York for off-Broadway auditions. Confident
in his abilities and anxious to further the pursuit of
his newly chosen avocation, Willis left school in the
middle of his junior year and rented a tiny apartment in
Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.
For Willis, the requisite pay-the-bills job
was a gig tending bar at the trendy Cafe Central, which
at the time was a hip networking spot for many of the
celebrities involved in the New York acting scene. When
not mixing drinks, he fearlessly pursued acting jobs,
frequently answering appointment-only casting calls
without an appointment and then demanding he be allowed
to audition anyway. He made his off-Broadway debut
in a production of Heaven and Earth, and got his
big break in 1984, when he was picked to replace Will
Patton in Sam
Shepard's Fool for Love. While thus engaged,
he caught the eye of a Miami Vice casting
director, who tapped him for a guest appearance as a
villainous, CIA-connected gunrunner; he gained
further national exposure in a series of commercials for
Levis 501 jeans.
Willis' cinematic résumé consisted of a paltry pair
of uncredited cameos (in The Verdict and The
First Deadly Sin) when he flew to Los Angeles in
1985 to read for a part in Madonna's
Desperately Seeking Susan. That audition turned
out to be a dead-end, and Willis was about to return to
New York when he got wind of a casting call for a new
ABC series to be titled Moonlighting. Willis
ended up among the last of the 3,000 hopefuls to read
for the part of David Addison, wisecracking foil to
Cybil Shepherd's Maddie Hayes. Producer Glenn Gordon
Caron immediately warmed to the relatively unknown
off-Broadway thesp, and in direct opposition to the
voluble objections of his ABC bosses, who didn't want to
squander the plum part on a New York nobody, Caron gave
Willis the part. As history notes, Moonlighting
became a monstrous ratings winner.
Though Shepherd and Willis crackled with chemistry
on-screen, they couldn't stand each other away from it,
and their numerous high-volume off-camera squabbles
gained Willis a reputation for temperament. The tabloids
ate it up, and soon Willis was a popular checkstand
whipping boy, as he lived large, endured a number of
run-ins with the L.A. police, cut a pair of celebrity
records for Motown, and made a high-profile bomb of
a feature film debut in Blake Edwards' Blind
Date. His Vegas wedding to Moore, whom he'd met at a
1987 screening of Stakeout, which starred the
actress' then-boyfriend Emilio Estevez, further
heightened his public profile. Derided as yet another
TV-star with a wannabe-Hollywood jones, Willis
persevered and silenced his critics for good with the
astounding critical and commercial success of Die
Hard, his first cinematic starring vehicle. Though
he voiced a cynical baby in the surprise 1989 hit
Look Who's Talking, Willis' movie career stalled
out until he duplicated the success of his breakthrough
characterization with Die Hard 2.
Over the next couple of years while Moore was in
the process of becoming the most sought-after
actress in Hollywood Willis made a number of attempts
to break out of the John McClane mold. After punchless
adaptations of Bonfire of the Vanities and
Billy Bathgate and the atrocious
singing-jewel-thief vanity project Hudson
Hawk (which was based on Willis' own story) bombed
in rapid succession, Willis briefly replenished his
box-office drawing power by blasting bad guys and
running from explosions in the The Last Boy
Scout. He stumbled again with poorly received
starring roles in Death Becomes Her, Striking
Distance (his first action dud), and North,
but revived both his critical and commercial reputations
in late 1994 with high-profile supporting turns in
Pulp Fiction and Nobody's Fool. His
drawing power was firmly reestablished by the financial
success of the 1995 films Twelve Monkeys and
Die Hard With a Vengeance, and of 1997's The
Fifth Element. Despite the fact that his 1998 summer
actioner Armageddon was one of the most hyped and
anticipated movies of the year, critic Roger Ebert
pretty much summed up its paucity of entertainment value
when he wrote, "No matter what they're charging to get
in, it's worth more to get out."
In June 1998, just one year after successfully (and
ironically) suing both an American and an Australian
tabloid for reporting that their marriage was on the
rocks, Willis and Moore parted ways, ending a
decade-long union of which Willis once reported, "Our
marriage is like anybody's marriage. It goes through ups
and down. It's a little garden that you have to tend all
the time. When we're home it's not like we walk around
all dolled up going, 'We are celebrities! We are
famous!' I change diapers. I clean up dog doo." Newly
single, Willis continued to loom large at the box
office: the well-received paranormal thriller The
Sixth Sense, in which he starred as a psychologist
trying to help a haunted child, joined James
Cameron's Titanic as the only film in history
to score five $20 million weekends; he headed up the
star-studded cast of Alan Rudolph's adaptation of
Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions; and he
co-starred opposite Michelle
Pfeiffer in the middling romantic dramedy The
Story of Us. The trio of roles for which he waived
his normal big money fee represented for Willis a
welcome and longed-for departure from his action-fare
rut, yet fans of his popular Die Hard franchise
can likely expect to see their bashed and bloodied hero
fighting the good fight in a fourth installment, which
reportedly could net its star a payday in excess of $25
million. In 2000, Willis logged an Emmy for Guest Actor
in a Comedy Series for his turn as the scary father of
David
Schwimmer's college-age love interest on
Friends, a gig he took after befriending castmate
Matthew
Perry during filming of the box-office blunder
The Whole Nine Yards. Also on the books in 2000
was Willis' star turn in the second-chance parable
Disney's The Kid.
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Bruce Willis 
