Bruce Willis the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006. Walter Bruce Willis was born on March 19, 1955, in the town of Idar-Oberstein, West Germany. His father, David Willis, was an American soldier. His mother, Marlene, was German, born in Kassel. Willis is the oldest of four children with a sister named Florence and two brothers, Robert (deceased) and David. After being discharged from the military in 1957, Willis's father took his family back to Carneys Point Township, New Jersey. Willis has described himself as having come from a "long line of blue collar people". His mother worked in a bank and
Nathaniel Parker Willis decades later, Jacobs would write in her pseudonymized autobiography "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", which she began composing while working for the Willis family, that she "was convinced that ... Nathaniel Parker Willis was proslavery". Willis is depicted as "Mr. Bruce", an unattractive Southern sympathizer in the book. One of Willis's tales, "The Night Funeral of a Slave", featured an abolitionist who visits the South and regrets his anti-slavery views; Frederick Douglass later used the work to criticize Northerners who were pro-slavery. Returning to New York City, Willis reorganized, along with George Pope Morris, the weekly "New