Bruce Willis and Demi Moore were married from 1987 to 2000. They have three daughters together, Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah.
Some couples are great at staying friends than lifelong partners. They value each other but their personalities are so unlike that staying happy together in a romantic relationship seems impossible. For actors Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, this led them to go their separate ways but the Ghost actress revealed some more details of what their marriage was like in her 2019 memoir Inside Out.
Moore and Willis were married from 1987 to 2000, during which time both of them were successful A-listers. Moore revealed in her memoir about the first time she met the Die Hard actor. She described him as "cocky, dark, and handsome," as per ETOnline. They met at the premiere of the 1987 film Stakeout, which starred Moore's ex-fiance, Emilio Estevez. Willis was completely focussed on her that night which sparked jealous feelings in her then-fiance. "He's all over you, like a cheap suit in the rain," Moore recalls him as saying.
"Bruce -- who'd been a bartender in New York City before he became a television star -- was showing off behind the bar that night, tossing the cocktail shaker in the air, the kind of thing that seemed cool in 1987 but sounds cringeworthy now, and Emilio had a point: Bruce was looking at me a lot as he went through his bar moves," Moore writes. "He was so attentive as the evening progressed, I was stunned to find out later that he'd actually been on a date that night with another woman."
That didn't stop Willis from asking her on a date and from there on it was a whirlwind romance. "It's hard not to feel good when someone showers you with that much attention," she explains in the memoir. "I think Bruce saw me as some kind of angelic savior when we first met, maybe partly because I was sober and not a party girl. .... Bruce insisted that he thought everything about me was beautiful: he wrapped my fear and anxiety in his love."
They got married in 1987 and soon were pregnant with Rumer. "I had loved being pregnant," Moore wrote. "The whole experience was wonderful from beginning to end. It didn't hurt that Bruce was constantly telling me how beautiful I looked for nine months."
They encountered problems when she returned to work because her once "gallant" husband wanted her to be a stay-at-home mom. He started being controlling towards her, she claimed. "We had a whirlwind, truncated infatuation that morphed into a full-on family, all in our very first year," Moore writes. "When reality set in, I don't know if we really knew each other. ... I think both of us from the outset were more passionate about having kids than we were about being married."
In 1989, when she was cast in We're No Angels with Robert De Niro and Sean Penn, Willis told her, "This is never going to work if you're off shooting a film," as per Fox News.
After her work on the film Ghost propelled her to stardom in 1990, he wasn't sure if he wanted to stay married to her. "He was proud of my work ... but not sure he was comfortable with the attention that came with it," she wrote, according to ETOnline. "...I just didn't buy the 'You're the king' kind of thing, which he thrived on. Plus, telling me, 'I don't know if I want to be married' is not exactly the way to my heart."
During the next decade, she suspected that he was cheating on her though she knew that he didn't want to walk out on his family, which had grown. They are parents to three daughters, Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah. Eventually, in 2000 they parted ways but Willis didn't reveal the exact reason.
"Well, I can give you the philosophical answer, which is also the most universal: Things change," he told Rolling Stone then. "People grow at different rates. People change at different rates. It's difficult for any couple to keep their marriage intact under the best of circumstances, and our marriage was under a huge magnifying glass all the time. So, it might have been a little more difficult for us. I haven't figured it out yet."
They may not have worked out as a romantic couple but their friendship as co-parents has remained strong over the years. Recently, the former couple has quarantined in their Idaho home together with their daughters. Willis' wife Emma Heming Willis and their two daughters are also living with them at the idyllic home. They have posted videos and photos from their time together showing that a blended family can be happy together.
References:
https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/bruce-willis-171842/