Happy birthday to one of New Jersey’s most famous Bruces

Action movie star Bruce Willis was born on March 19th, 1955 to an army family in West Germany. The family soon moved to Carney’s Point, where Willis grew up.

He attended Penn’s Grove High School where he joined the drama club to help with his stutter. After he graduated, he was a security guard at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant and, for a short time, a private investigator (foreshadowing?). He enrolled at Montclair State University but left after his junior year to pursue acting in New York. He left New York and moved to California and got a few bit parts before auditioning for a new show, Moonlighting. He reportedly beat out over 3,000 actors to land the role that made him a star.

He was on the show from 1985-89 before making the transition to movies. He had a couple of comedic roles and then getting the part that made him a bona fide action star: John McClane in Die Hard. The movie was a runaway success and launched Willis into the upper tier of Hollywood stars. He starred in two sequels which were also major successes. After a minor slump in the early ‘90s, he made his comeback in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. He followed with starring roles in 12 Monkeys, The Fifth Element, and The Sixth Sense.

He has continued to work steadily in movies like The Expendables and Moonrise Kingdom and he played a Lego version of himself in The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. He was married to actress Demi Moore from 1987 to 2000 and married Emma Hemings in 2009.

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