Bruce Willis - 65: What Audiences Don't Know About Die Hard

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

March 19 marks the 65th anniversary of the main superman of Hollywood, the famous American film actor, producer and musician Bruce Willis. On the screens, he invariably looked courageous, cheerful, ironic, self-confident, and it seemed that off-screen he fully corresponded to this image. However, in fact, the choice of the acting profession was predetermined by a defect that the actor suffered from in childhood. What difficulties Die Hard had to cope with in real life, and how this affected his character - further in the review.

One of the most famous American actors, Walter Bruce Willis, was born in West Germany to a US military man and a German housewife. After 2 years, the family moved to the United States. As a child, Bruce had one problem that gave him a lot of difficulties - he stuttered, and from excitement he was completely speechless. He enrolled in a school theater group to get rid of this defect - when he performed in front of a large audience, stuttering disappeared, but behind the scenes the speech defect returned.

The actor recalled: "". Then, for the first time, he thought seriously about the acting profession. During his school years, another of his hobbies appeared - wrestling. But one day he suffered a serious sprain, after which Bruce underwent surgery, which left a scar on his right shoulder.

Before becoming the star of the screen, Bruce Willis changed several professions: in his youth, he worked as a security guard at a nuclear power plant, a driver delivering crews of workers to a factory, a bartender and even a private detective. In parallel, he attended auditions for various theaters and advertising studios, thanks to which he soon began acting in commercials and playing small roles in low-budget films and on theater stages. In one of these productions, he was noticed and invited to audition in Los Angeles.

Bruce Willis failed his first tests, but accidentally ended up on others - in the pilot episode of the "Moonlight Detective Agency" series. The project was an incredible success and was nominated for an Emmy in 16 categories, including Best Actor. The actor earned his first popularity in the role of a comedian, and only after 3 years the audience saw him in the image of the invincible rescuer of the world in Die Hard.

Interestingly, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Richard Gere were initially offered the lead role, and only after they refused, Bruce Willis became Die Hard. For this role, he received such a high fee that no other actor had received before - $ 5 million. True, during the filming, he suffered: in one of the scenes, the sound of the shot was too loud due to the acoustically closed small space, and the actor was practically deaf in his left ear.

This action movie became his calling card, brought world fame, but also made him hostage to one image - since then, Bruce Willis has always been offered the same type of role of superheroes saving lives. To destroy this stereotype, the actor agreed to participate in the filming of melodramas. So, in the tragicomedy "The Story of Us", he showed himself as a dramatic actor. But most directors and viewers still preferred to see him in the images of invincible heroes, preventing catastrophes of a universal scale - as in "Armageddon" and "The Fifth Element".

Although most of the projects in which he participated were successful, there were also roles that the actor voluntarily refused, and then had every reason to regret it. This happened with the film "Ghost", in which his wife, actress Demi Moore, was approved for the main role. Bruce Willis refused to become her partner on the set, as he believed that the image of a ghost could harm his film career. And this film became a superhit and a high point for another actor - Patrick Swayze. For some reason, Bruce Willis refused to shoot in Ocean's Eleven, which he probably also regretted later. But he agreed to the role of a child psychologist in "The Sixth Sense" only because he had to star in another film of the Disney studio under the contract, and, to his surprise, this film became a cult film and received 6 Oscar nominations.

Bruce Willis is considered one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, but sometimes he agrees to participate in projects not for material gain, but simply "out of friendship." So, for example, it was with the film "The Fifth Element". At first, director Luc Besson was afraid to invite such an "expensive" artist to his project, but unexpectedly for him, Bruce agreed to conditions that were rather unfavorable by Hollywood standards, explaining this by the fact that sometimes he could "".

He himself said: "". And in these one and a half years, Willis watched Besson's film "Leon" and was delighted, deciding that such a director could not make a bad movie, and that he could be completely trusted. And he was not mistaken! Bruce also received a rather low fee for his role in Pulp Fiction - he just really wanted to play in Tarantino's film, although he initially claimed the role that eventually got Travolta.

In addition to filming a movie, Bruce Willis also tried his hand at being a restaurateur, investing considerable sums in the restaurant business and becoming a co-owner of the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain. True, since the late 1990s. they and their partners have repeatedly found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy. The second most important hobby of the actor after cinema was music, and he sometimes gave small recitals, releasing in the 1980s. 2 albums performed in country style. However, later his career as a musician ended.

Although the bald head has long become an invariable attribute of his image, the actor is still worried about the fact that he lost his hair. This happened to him at the age of 30, and since then he has tried many procedures, but even after the implantation, the hair began to fall out again. Everyone believed that Bruce Willis had already come to terms with this problem, but recently he announced that he was ready to become the first person to test a recently discovered technology called "hair cloning". Obviously, even superheroes suffer from complexes!

This family union was called one of the most beautiful in Hollywood: Demi Moore and Bruce Willis.