It was never supposed to be like this. Him, an untouchable movie icon critically mauled after a series of flagship flops, reduced to appearing as a computer-generated raccoon in a kiddie cartoon called Over the Hedge. And Her, the defiant, striving, superstar Yin to his blockbusting Yang, emerging from the shadows of self-imposed Tinseltown exile only to star in a dreary derivative B-list horror shlocker Half Light about seeing dead people. It’s almost too much to bear. It’s like seeing the Hope Diamond in the front window of H. Samuel’s. This is Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, for chrissakes! Yes, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. The original franchise era movie star mega-couple. They blazed the trail for Brad’n’Angelina, Tom’n’Katie, and Ben’n’Insert Name Here. And yet they did so without any of the whimpering self-regard that’s fundamental to the modern movie star relationship. Instead, they had balls. She shaved her head, made hot-button films, and appeared naked on magazine covers. He bought restaurants, shot people on camera, and courted presidents. Together, they owned the 1990s. And even if their divorce in October 2000 signalled the end of a beautiful dream, they remained fixed in the cultural consciousness. Bruce and Demi. Demi and Bruce.
Even now they make it hard for us to think of them separately. Demi snags a new husband, Ashton Kutcher, but Bruce is at their wedding. Demi makes a new movie, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, and Bruce takes a cameo. Demi goes to the premiere with Ashton . . . and Bruce is there.
In the freefall of fading stardom, too, when the erratic screen successes of the Noughties began to elude them, Bruce and Demi seemed to tumble in sad simpatico. He, the ex-Mr Demi Moore, made misfires such as Bandits, Hart’s War and Hostage. She, the ex-Mrs Bruce Willis, made the glum psychological melodrama Passion of Mind and little else. They were, conceptually, at sea together.
But yes, Bruce and Demi owned the 1990s. And, if you happened to be a lucky resident of Hailey, Idaho, during this decade, that was literally the case — after their wedding in 1987, the couple moved to Hailey and began buying up the town, including the drugstore, bar and theatre. At the time they met, Willis was the hard-grafting blue-collar thespian from New Jersey who had overcome a crushing childhood stutter through acting and graduated overnight from bar work at New York’s Kamikaze Club to the role of loveable screen rogue David Addison in the smash hit TV series Moonlighting.
Moore, born Demetria Guynes, had her own hard-knock credentials, which included a tough childhood with a drunken stepfather who committed suicide when she was 15. She slowly segued from modelling to a part in the TV soap General Hospital to lead roles in the Brat Pack films St Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night.
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It is worth noting perhaps that Willis and Moore didn’t actually break through to super-stardom until the beginning of their married life. In 1989 Willis heralded the arrival of a newer, softer post-Stallone action hero with Die Hard, while in 1990 Moore brought a smart and implacable beauty to Ghost. Both films were blockbusters and quickly set Willis and Moore on mutually complementary career paths.
And yet, ironically, within both of these movies lie the seeds of their debilitation. As the New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell observed, the wonderful vulnerability of Willis in Die Hard, the key to that movie’s success, would be quickly quashed by the later movies’ desire for popular quips and spectacular set-pieces. The defining moment of Willis’s career would thus become the sight of his John McClane leaping out in front of an exploding fireball (and not the film’s banter, or his unassuming turn). As the 1990s progressed, the softer side of Willis’s screen heroes was often minimised, leaving little to celebrate in the likes of The Last Boy Scout and Striking Distance (Willis would later complain that the dialogue-led moments of Armageddon were removed by the director, Michael Bay).
Similarly, in Ghost the glamorous depiction of the grieving Moore was almost too perfect to be real. Her skin was almost too silken, her tears too crystalline, her body too toned. She was so unattainably perfect that not even her dead lover, Patrick Swayze, could have her. She remained the ineffable object of desire in Disclosure, Indecent Proposal and Striptease. But this, of course, was the 1990s — the era of “spin”. It was a time when everyone, from pop stars to politicians, knew that image was truth and reality was fiction. In the 1990s everything aimed to be shamelessly “iconic”. And there was nothing more iconic, on and off screen, than Bruce and Demi. Thus, when the 1990s ended, and their marriage imploded, Bruce and Demi’s iconic status was suddenly and cruelly calcified.
Look at Moore on screen in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003). Though only six years older than her nearest-age co-star Lucy Liu, Moore seems like an actress from another age. It’s nothing to do with acting, it’s about presence — Moore is still big; it’s the pictures that got small. Similarly, Willis has gamely prodded his own image in films such as Breakfast of Champions and The Kid, but the populism of his 1990s heyday continues to drive him back to action vehicles such as Hostage.
The greatest irony, of course, is that now, in the current era of lowest common denominator celebrity, we need Bruce and Demi like never before. For they have that rare and fading thing — genuine star aura. Make no mistake, Will Young is a fine singer, and Heath Ledger and Scarlett Johansson are fine actors. But Willis and Moore are larger than life. And sometimes, sitting back in the dark, staring up at a large white screen, that’s just what you need.