![]() (The list also largely skips Willis’s voiceover work, apart from a pair of talking baby movies.) Though there’s undoubtedly a fascinating study to be made of that work, this ranking of Willis films is pushing them aside to focus on the films that played theaters. The final stretch of Willis’s career is defined by a string of low-budget, quickly made direct-to-video roles, seemingly the efforts of a man attempting to work as much as possible while he still could. Not every film worked but, taken as a whole, Willis’s filmography suggests an actor with a savvy sense of his own abilities who frequently looked for challenges that stretched those abilities without breaking them. ![]() Wise guys largely gave way to tough guys with tragic histories or eccentric tendencies, but this seemed less like a break from the past than a natural evolution. As Willis’s career progressed, some of the mischievousness evaporated as he found himself more frequently playing characters overwhelmed by melancholy. Sometimes it’s meant leaning into goofiness or playing against type with a wink. Sometimes that’s meant turning down the charm and emphasizing the toughness. Willis’s film career - launched while Moonlighting was still in production - has been less a matter of chameleonic reinvention than of pushing that persona in new directions. But it’s mostly because Willis, even at this early point in his career, understood what he brought to the screen and what he could naturally do well. And it’s partly because the tabloid stories about Moonlighting’s troubled production seemed to echo the fraught relationship between Willis and Shepherd’s characters. That’s partly because the Willis who made talk-show appearances, appeared in wine-cooler ads, and branched out into music with the album and HBO mockumentary The Return of Bruno, appeared so similar to his star-making role. It also made it hard to figure out where Addison ended and Willis began. The almost-30-year-old actor (with a hairline that made him look older) easily slipped into the shoes of David Addison, a roguish, wisecracking, blue-collar private eye with a twinkle in his eye who never seemed to be taking anything seriously but did the right thing when the moment called for it (especially if the moment called for muscle). It was a roll of the dice that paid off for both the series and Willis. Willis was essentially unknown outside of those paying attention to Off Broadway (and Off Off Broadway) theater productions when producer Glenn Gordon Caron cast him opposite Cybill Shepherd in the breezy mystery series Moonlighting. But then not many stars follow the path he took, either in his unusual route to stardom or his unwillingness to rely only on the traits that made him famous to keep that stardom sustained. It’s always impressive when a star breaks through with a fully formed persona, and no star manifested a persona as completely as Willis did when he first rose to fame in the mid-’80s. When his family announced in February that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of dementia, the scope of his expansive career was pulled into sharp focus. It’s hard to fully express what movies have lost with the retirement of Bruce Willis. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos: 20th Century Studios, Disney, Sony Pictures, TriStar Pictures, Universal Pictures
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