Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis arrived through television. Moonlighting began in 1985 and made him a star in a register nobody associated with action cinema - fast, verbal, comic. He won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 1987 and a Golden Globe in the same year. So when Die Hard cast him as John McClane in 1988 for a reported five million dollars, the objection at the time was that he was a comedian. That turned out to be the whole design of the thing.

Die Hard took around 140 million dollars worldwide and collected four Academy Award nominations, all of them technical. More to the point, it changed what an action lead was permitted to be: frightened, sarcastic, visibly out of his depth. The nineties then gave him range on top of that. Pulp Fiction in 1994 put him in the middle of the decade's most imitated film. 12 Monkeys followed in 1995, The Fifth Element in 1997, Armageddon in 1998 - three films with almost nothing in common.

The end of the run was the strongest part of it. The Sixth Sense in 1999 grossed over 672 million dollars worldwide, the second-largest total of the year, and drew six Oscar nominations. Unbreakable followed in 2000 with the same director. In the same stretch he took a second Emmy, in 2000, for guest appearances on Friends - a drama Emmy and a comedy guest Emmy, a combination very few performers have managed in either order.

The then-and-now comparison has a hard stop. On 30 March 2022 his family announced that he was retiring from acting following a diagnosis of aphasia, a condition affecting language. In February 2023 they said the diagnosis had been refined to frontotemporal dementia. Those are the facts that have been publicly confirmed and there is nothing useful to add to them. What the span of decades shows is a career of nearly forty years that closed on a stated decision rather than on a slow decline in offers.