Bruce Willis profile: net worth, age, height, wife and children

Bruce Willis, born Walter Bruce Willis on March 19, 1955, in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany, is a 71-year-old retired American actor whose net worth is estimated at $250 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. He moved from television fame on Moonlighting to become one of Hollywood’s defining action stars as John McClane in the Die Hard films, while also leading Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense, Armageddon and Unbreakable across a career that ran from 1980 to 2022. He has been married to Emma Heming Willis since 2009 and is the father of five daughters.

Quick facts

Biography and early life

Walter Bruce Willis was born on March 19, 1955, in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany, so his birthday falls in mid-March and he turned 71 in March 2026. According to Wikipedia and Celebrity Net Worth, his father, David Willis, was an American soldier stationed in Germany, and his mother, Marlene, was German and came from Kassel. Willis is a United States citizen and was raised in the United States: after his father’s discharge from the military, the family moved to New Jersey when he was a small child, and he grew up in the Penns Grove and Carneys Point area. His mother worked in banking, and his father held blue-collar jobs including work as a welder and factory employee. Willis was the eldest of four children, with a younger sister, Florence, and two younger brothers, Robert, who died in 2001, and David.

Willis had a pronounced stutter as a child and discovered that performing on stage helped him overcome it. He became active in drama at Penns Grove High School, where he also served as student council president. After graduating, he worked jobs that included security work at a nuclear power plant and driving work connected to a DuPont facility, and briefly worked as a private investigator. He enrolled at Montclair State University to study drama but left before finishing his degree, moved to New York City, and supported himself tending bar while auditioning. His early work included stage productions, commercials and small screen appearances, including an uncredited role in the 1982 film The Verdict.

His health is part of his public biography only in the terms his family has chosen to state. In March 2022, his family announced that he had been diagnosed with aphasia, a condition affecting communication, and that he would retire from acting. In February 2023, the family announced the more specific diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia, explaining that the communication problems were one symptom of that condition and saying they hoped public attention would raise awareness of it. This profile states those family announcements briefly and adds no speculation about his current condition beyond what the family has publicly shared.

Career

Willis’s breakthrough came in 1985, when he won the role of wisecracking private detective David Addison Jr. on ABC’s Moonlighting, opposite Cybill Shepherd. The series mixed mystery, comedy and romance, ran from 1985 to 1989, and earned Willis a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and a Golden Globe. While still on the show, he was cast against type as New York police officer John McClane in Die Hard in 1988. His vulnerable, sarcastic, everyman version of an action hero helped redefine the genre, and the film made him an international movie star. According to Celebrity Net Worth, he earned $5 million for the first Die Hard, $7.5 million for Die Hard 2 in 1990, $15 million for Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995 and $25 million for Live Free or Die Hard in 2007, returning for a fifth film, A Good Day to Die Hard, in 2013.

The 1990s made him one of the best-paid actors in the world while also showing his willingness to take risks. After uneven commercial results with films including The Bonfire of the Vanities and Hudson Hawk, he accepted a reduced salary of about $800,000 to play boxer Butch Coolidge in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994, a cultural phenomenon that reinvigorated his career. He followed it with Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys in 1995, The Fifth Element in 1997 and Armageddon in 1998, which became the highest-grossing film worldwide of its year. In 1999 he played child psychologist Malcolm Crowe in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. Celebrity Net Worth reports a $14 million upfront salary plus a backend share that took his total earnings from the film to an estimated $114 million, one of the largest single-film paydays in Hollywood history. The restrained performance also began his long collaboration with Shyamalan, continued in Unbreakable in 2000 and completed with Glass in 2019.

Through the 2000s and 2010s he alternated between franchise action and filmmaker-driven work. His credits included Bandits, Hart’s War, Tears of the Sun, Hostage, Lucky Number Slevin and the ensemble crime film Sin City in 2005. He appeared in The Expendables films, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and RED in 2010 and RED 2 in 2013 alongside Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich. In 2012 he took supporting roles in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and Rian Johnson’s Looper. He also won a second Emmy for a guest appearance on Friends. In his final working years he appeared in a long run of independently financed action and thriller films, reuniting with John Travolta in Paradise City in 2022, decades after Pulp Fiction. His last released film was Assassin in March 2023, completed before his retirement was announced. Anyone reviewing a long-held property from those peak earning years faces the same background questions covered in a plain-English guide to capital gains on property sales for beginners, though Willis’s own sales were handled at a scale few sellers ever reach.

Movies and television shows

Willis’s best-known credits, drawn from his published filmography, include the following.

• Moonlighting (1985–1989, television), as David Addison Jr.
• Die Hard (1988), Die Hard 2 (1990), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Live Free or Die Hard (2007) and A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), as John McClane
• Look Who’s Talking (1989), as the voice of Mikey
• Pulp Fiction (1994), as Butch Coolidge
• 12 Monkeys (1995) and The Fifth Element (1997)
• Armageddon (1998)
• The Sixth Sense (1999), as Malcolm Crowe
• Unbreakable (2000), Split (2016, uncredited) and Glass (2019), as David Dunn
• Sin City (2005)
• RED (2010) and RED 2 (2013)
• Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and Looper (2012)
• Friends (2000, television guest role, Emmy winner)
• Assassin (2023), his final film

Willis also recorded music. A singer and harmonica player with a long interest in blues and rhythm and blues, he released the album The Return of Bruno in 1987, including a hit cover of Respect Yourself, and followed it with If It Don’t Kill You, It Just Makes You Stronger in 1989. Acting remained his primary career, but the records were a genuine second pursuit rather than a one-off novelty.

Net worth

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Bruce Willis has a net worth of $250 million. Parade’s 2026 profile reports the same figure, citing Celebrity Net Worth, and the estimate has held at that level for years in published tracking. One older listing of $200 million circulates in secondary roundups, but the current, consistently published figure is $250 million, and it is presented here as an estimate rather than a confirmed account, since Willis’s private finances are not public.

The earnings record behind the estimate is exceptional even by Hollywood standards. Celebrity Net Worth documents $5 million for the first Die Hard rising to $25 million for the fourth, around $10 million each for the two Look Who’s Talking voice roles, roughly $14 million for The Last Boy Scout, $16.5 million for Last Man Standing, about $14.8 million for Armageddon and around $20 million apiece for The Kid and Unbreakable in 2000. The Sixth Sense alone produced an estimated $114 million once its backend participation paid out on a worldwide gross of more than $670 million. Decades of salaries at that level, plus production work and real estate gains covered below, are the substance behind the $250 million total.

Personal life and family

Willis married actress Demi Moore in 1987 after a short courtship. They had three daughters, Rumer, born in 1988, Scout, born in 1991, and Tallulah, born in 1994, and divorced in 2000, while maintaining a close friendship that both have described publicly, including shared family holidays. In 2009 he married model and entrepreneur Emma Heming, now Emma Heming Willis. They have two daughters, Mabel Ray, born in 2012, and Evelyn Penn, born in 2014, giving Willis five daughters in total. He became a grandfather in 2023 when Rumer welcomed a daughter. His parents, David and Marlene Willis, and his siblings Florence, Robert and David complete the immediate family covered in his published biography, and since 2022 his wife and daughters, together with Moore, have been the public voices for the family’s joint statements about his health and retirement.

House

Willis has bought and sold luxury property across the United States and the Caribbean for decades. According to Celebrity Net Worth, he and Demi Moore paid approximately $7 million in 1990 for a large duplex in the San Remo building overlooking Central Park in Manhattan and later acquired another apartment in the building; Moore received the property in their divorce and sold it for $45 million in 2017. Willis later owned a large Central Park West apartment with Emma Heming Willis, which they sold for approximately $17.75 million in 2018 before buying a smaller Manhattan apartment for roughly $8 million. The same source records further properties over the years in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Idaho.

More recent reporting places the family’s main home in the Brentwood Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Profile and property sources report that Willis and Emma Heming Willis bought a home there in 2019 for about $9.8 million, described at roughly 13,000 square feet, after selling property in New York, including a Westchester County estate sold in 2019 to 2020, and an Idaho estate sold in 2018. His beachfront compound in Turks and Caicos was sold for a reported $27 million. Because several of these transactions are known through property reporting rather than Willis’s own statements, prices are given here as reported figures, and no current interior detail beyond those reports is claimed.

Instagram

On the Instagram question, the honest answer is that Bruce Willis has no independently verified personal account that he runs himself. Entertainment sources including ComingSoon and Hello Magazine have stated plainly that he does not have his own Instagram page, and his public appearances on the platform come through the accounts of his wife, Emma Heming Willis, and his daughters, who share family photographs and the health updates the family chooses to publish. Some profile websites list a handle presented as family-curated, but that listing is not independently verified as an official personal account, so no handle is stated as his here. Readers looking for authentic updates should follow the verified family accounts rather than fan pages using his name.

Closing summary

Bruce Willis’s profile is one of the great television-to-film careers in Hollywood history. Born on March 19, 1955, in Idar-Oberstein to David and Marlene Willis and raised in New Jersey, he overcame a childhood stutter, broke through on Moonlighting, redefined the action hero in Die Hard, took career risks in Pulp Fiction and 12 Monkeys, and earned one of the largest single-film paydays ever recorded from The Sixth Sense. Married to Emma Heming Willis since 2009 and the father of Rumer, Scout, Tallulah, Mabel and Evelyn, he retired in 2022, with an estimated net worth of $250 million according to Celebrity Net Worth.