Willis has announced he’s to retire from acting following an aphasia diagnosis. How we will miss new work from a man who brought such wry humility to mainstream cinema – and reinvented the vest
The news of Bruce Willis’s retirement on health grounds brings its own special kind of sadness. Admittedly, he has been booking some dodgy films in the last year or so – I recently sat through a pretty sorry action thriller called Out of Death with Bruce in his comfort zone as the retired cop who has to take on a terrifying situation.
But even there, Willis’s coolly amiable, faintly contemptuous, always battle-ready presence sprinkled a little much-needed vinegar in the blandness. And so often in so many different kinds of film, Bruce Willis has been the wild card – or, actually, the trump card.
He has been the archetypal super-testosterone male-pattern baldness hombre, the guy who made wearing a vest – not a t-shirt, a vest – look iconic. Despite being the rebel with bullshit-detector on high alert, Bruce has often been cast as the authority figure. (When I first read PJ O’Rourke libertarian screed Republican Party Reptile, I thought of Willis.)
