Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis, actor and musician, is well-known for his wisecracking and hard-edged parts in action films. He has been in over $2.5 billion worth of films. Walter Bruce Willis was born on March 19, 1955, in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany, to a German mother, Marlene Kassel, and an American father, David Andrew Willis (from Carneys Point, New Jersey), who were then living at a United States military base. His family moved to the U.S. shortly after he was born. He was raised in Penns Grove, New Jersey in which his mother worked at a bank and his father was a welding and factory worker. Willis began to develop an interest in dramatic arts during his high school. He was "discovered" when he worked in a New York City cafe. Then, he was a part of various off-Broadway productions. One night, Willis was working as a bartender and was noticed by a casting supervisor who was impressed by his character. He was looking for bartenders to play the role of a minor character in a film. Willis was a part of countless auditions before getting the role in the romantic comedy of the same name, Moonlighting (1985), as David Addison. The sly and wise-cracking P.I. is viewed by some as a dry run for the role of the hard-boiled NYC detective "John McClane" in the cult film Die Hard (1988), in which Willis' character single-handedly battled an gang of vicious international thieves inside the Los Angeles skyscraper. Willis reprised the role of McClane in the sequel, Die Hard 2 (1990) and was set in wintery Washington's Dulles International Airport as a group of renegade Special Forces soldiers seek to return a corrupt South American general. Excellent box office returns demanded the sequel Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) and this time with co-star Samuel L. Jackson as a cynical Harlem shop owner who accidentally gets into helping McClane during a terrorist bombing campaign in the midst of a hot summer day in New York.