Often in spectacular action films, Bruce Willis, an actor and musician, is well-known for playing wisecracking or hard-edged characters. He has starred in movies with combined grossing power of around $2.5 billion USD.
Marlene Kassel, a German mother, and David Andrew Willis, an American father (from Carneys Point, New Jersey), were residing on a United States military base in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany, when Walter Bruce Willis was born on March 19, 1955. His family relocated to the United States shortly after his birth, and he was reared in Penns Grove, New Jersey, where his mother was employed at a bank and his father was a welder and factory worker. Willis developed an interest in the dramatic arts during his high school years. He was reputedly “discovered” while working at a café in New York City and subsequently appeared in a few off-Broadway productions. One evening, while serving drinks, he was observed by a casting director who was impressed by his demeanor and required a bartender for a minor film role.
Bruce Willis Best Movies
Willis made numerous uncredited minor film appearances after numerous auditions before securing the role of private investigator “David Addison” in the popular romantic comedy television series Moonlighting (1985) with the seductive Cybill Shepherd. Some regard his sarcastic and wisecracking private investigator as a preparatory exercise for the role of the hard-boiled New York City detective “John McClane” in the monster smash Die Hard (1988), in which Willis’ character single-handedly defeated a gang of ruthless international thieves in a Los Angeles skyscraper. In the sequel, Die Hard 2 (1990), he returned to the role of McClane. The film is set at a snowbound Dulles International Airport in Washington, where a group of dissident Special Forces soldiers are attempting to repatriate a corrupt South American general. The success of Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) necessitated a sequel. This time, Samuel L. Jackson played a cynical Harlem store owner who was inadvertently compelled to assist McClane during a terrorist bombing campaign in New York on a scorching day.
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In 1989, Willis took a break from the action to voice “Mikey” the infant in the highly successful family comedy Look Who’s Talking, which was followed by Look Who’s Talking Too (1990), which also starred John Travolta and Kirstie Alley. Throughout the subsequent decade, Willis appeared in a variety of films, including some that were highly successful, others that were eccentric, and some that were unlucky at the box office. Both Hudson Hawk (1991) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) were significant financial failures that were severely criticized by critics. It is possible that these films should be omitted from the CVs of all the actors involved. Nevertheless, Willis continued to be popular with movie audiences and sold a significant number of theater tickets with the hyper-violent The Last Boy Scout (1991), the darkly humorous Death Becomes Her (1992), and the mediocre police thriller Striking Distance (1993).
In the 1990s, Willis also took part in a number of independent and low-budget productions, which earned him new fans and praise from critics for his captivating performances. He collaborated with a variety of film directors. His filmography includes the peculiarly captivating North (1994), the mega-hit Pulp Fiction (1994) directed by Quentin Tarantino, the apocalyptic thriller 12 Monkeys (1995) directed by Terry Gilliam, the sci-fi opus The Fifth Element (1997) directed by Luc Besson, and the spine-tingling epic The Sixth Sense (1999) directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
Willis subsequently appeared in the gangster comedy The Whole Nine Yards (2000), collaborated with “hot” director M. Night Shyamalan on the less than captivating Unbreakable (2000), and appeared in two military dramas, Hart’s War (2002) and Tears of the Sun (2003), which failed to ignite the imaginations of both audiences and critics. Nevertheless, Willis regained his fame in the critically acclaimed Frank Miller graphic novel-turned-film Sin City (2005), provided the voice of “RJ” the scheming raccoon in the animated hit Over the Hedge (2006), and fans of “Die Hard” were delighted to see “John McClane” return to the big screen in the high-tech Live Free or Die Hard (2007), also known as “Die Hard 4.0.”