Walter Bruce Willis was born on 19 March 1955 in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany, where his American father was stationed, and grew up in Penns Grove, New Jersey. He had a pronounced stammer as a boy which fell away whenever he stood on a stage, and he has credited that discovery with pushing him towards acting rather than the factory work most of his schoolfriends went into.

Willis worked off-Broadway through the early 1980s, taking over a lead in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, and picked up single-episode parts in Miami Vice and Hart to Hart. His first real money came from advertising: a Seagram’s wine cooler campaign made his face nationally familiar and paid a seven-figure sum for two years of work.

In 1985 he was cast as David Addison in Moonlighting opposite Cybill Shepherd. The series ran five seasons and won him an Emmy and a Golden Globe. His episode fee began modestly and, on our estimate, reached roughly fifty thousand dollars an episode by the show’s peak – two to three million dollars across sixty-seven episodes, before residuals.

Twentieth Century Fox offered John McClane to most of the established action stars of the day before it reached the television comic with the receding hairline. Willis asked for five million dollars, an unheard-of fee for a television actor moving into film, and the studio paid it (Empire). Die Hard opened in 1988, took around 140 million dollars worldwide against a reported 28 million dollar budget (Box Office Mojo), and rebuilt the genre around a hero who bled.

That single fee reset his market. Through the 1990s Willis worked at roughly twenty million dollars a picture, the ceiling of the day, and he worked constantly: Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, The Fifth Element, Armageddon and four more Die Hard films spread across twenty-five years. On our estimate the franchise alone paid him something in the region of seventy million dollars in fees.

The most lucrative decision of his career was a trade. For The Sixth Sense in 1999 he took fourteen million dollars up front instead of his standard twenty, in exchange for roughly seventeen per cent of the worldwide gross. The film took close to 673 million dollars (Box Office Mojo), and his participation was reported at well above one hundred million (Variety’s oral history of the film) – among the most profitable back-end deals any actor has signed.

His leverage held far longer than most. In 2013 he walked away from The Expendables 3 after asking a million dollars a day for four days of work and being refused (The Hollywood Reporter). In the decade that followed he took on a high volume of low-budget thrillers, on our estimate roughly twenty-five of them at one to two million dollars each. Adding the television years, the studio decades, the Sixth Sense participation and that late volume work, we put his gross career earnings from acting at 400 to 500 million dollars before tax and representation.

Willis won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Moonlighting and a second Emmy in 2000 for a guest run on Friends. He took a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006. In March 2022 his family announced that he was retiring from acting after almost five decades on screen (Variety). The Golden Raspberry organisers, who weeks earlier had created a category aimed at his recent output, withdrew it and apologised.

The Seagram’s campaign of the mid-1980s was the template: a recognisable face, a short shoot, a large cheque. Willis repeated it for four decades and was a fixture of Japanese television advertising, fronting campaigns for Subaru, Eneos and Daihatsu at fees far above what the same thirty seconds earns at home. Contract values in that market are private, so we estimate rather than assert: our estimate is lifetime endorsement income of 30 to 50 million dollars gross, assuming a handful of campaigns per decade at seven-figure fees and no equity component.

Willis was a founding celebrity investor in Planet Hollywood alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, a chain that expanded aggressively, floated in 1996 and then entered Chapter 11 twice within three years. The equity he held was largely wiped out. He did better where he took ownership instead of a fee: an equity position in the Polish vodka brand Sobieski in 2009 in exchange for promoting it, and a cluster of small businesses in Hailey, Idaho, including the Mint bar and the restored Liberty Theatre.

His largest visible holdings have always been in Idaho. From the early 1990s he bought a string of properties around Hailey and Sun Valley, several bought to revive the town centre rather than as investments, and has traded in and out of that portfolio for thirty years. Elsewhere he has owned a Turks and Caicos beachfront estate listed at 33 million dollars, homes in Beverly Hills and on Central Park West, and a house at Bedford Corners in Westchester County. Property is a meaningful but secondary component of the total.