Bruce Willis

Actor and musician Bruce Willis is well known for playing wisecracking or hard-edged characters, usually in stunning action films. He has appeared in more than $2.5 billion worth of films. Walter Bruce Willis was born on March 19, 1955, in the city of Idar-Oberstein (West Germany) to Marlene Kassel and David Andrew Willis (from Carneys Point New Jersey), both of whom were living at a United States military base. His family moved to U.S. shortly after he was born, and he was raised in Penns Grove, New Jersey in which his mother worked at a bank and his father was a welder as well as a factory worker. Willis was an avid drama fan in high school. While working at an New York City café, his name was "discovered". Then, he began to appear in several off-Broadway productions. One night, Willis worked as a bartender, and was spotted by a casting manager who liked his style of work. He was looking for bartenders for a small role in a movie. After many auditions, Willis had a brief appearance in films that were often uncredited, prior to taking on the role of the private investigator "David Addison" alongside sultry Cybill Shepherd on the popular romantic comedy TV series Moonlighting (1985). His witty and sarcastic P.I. is viewed by some as an exercise in preparation for the role of the hard-boiled NYC detective "John McClane" in the monster-movie Die Hard (1988), in which Willis McClane's character battled an uncompromising gang of international thieves inside the Los Angeles skyscraper. He reprised his role as McClane in the follow-up film, Die Hard 2 (1990), set at a snowy Washington's Dulles International Airport as a group of renegade Special Forces soldiers seek to get back an infamous South American general. Strong box office results prompted an additional sequel Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) and this time co-starring Samuel L. Jackson as an unrepentant 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.