Motor racing legend Sir Jackie Stewart has offered to talk to Bruce Willis and his family as he understands exactly what they are going through.
The Die Hard star has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a rare form of the brain condition, which is also known as Pick’s Disease.
Sir Jackie’s wife Lady Helen, 82, has been living with the illness herself since 2014 and recently lost the ability to walk.
“Bruce is a great man, and he can still be a great man, even with dementia,” says Sir Jackie, who has offered his help through this newspaper if the actor and his family wanted to make contact for advice and reassurance. “I don’t know to what extent he’s got dementia. But I’d love to give him a call. He’s a wonderful actor - a superstar. Like us, he’s lucky to have the resources for round-the-clock care. But very few people have those privileges.”
Lady Helen, who has been married to Sir Jackie for over 60 years, needs 24-hour specialist care at home, which costs the couple close to £7million a year.
She now uses a wheelchair and must stay close to a hospital in case she falls and injures herself, which has prompted the couple to move to a property in Switzerland that’s within 200 metres of a top-notch clinic.
While she has kept her sense of humour - “she likes to have a good laugh” - Sir Jackie says his wife’s short-term memory has deteriorated greatly. The razor-sharp woman, who used to time-keep for her husband to the millisecond while he was tearing around the Formula One track, can no longer shower, eat or go to bed independently, “It’s a terrible thing to sit and watch,” says Sir Jackie quietly.
“She doesn’t recognise she’s got dementia. I’ve just finished having lunch with her, we had a great conversation together. But she will not remember what we said. I told her I have to go to Lichtenstein at the weekend, then to Bahrain for the Grand Prix, and she was unhappy about me leaving. But she will have forgotten that already.”
Dementia will kill one in three people born today, but funding for research into the condition falls significantly short of funds for other illnesses like cancer. Sir Jackie’s charity Race Against Dementia, which he set up after Helen’s diagnosis, aims to help change that, by supporting the research of top academics from top medical institutes around the world, including buying high-spec equipment for their clinics.
“Right now, the medical world is not doing enough,” he says, sternly. “The pharmaceutical industry is not doing enough. So we hope to find a cure to this in my lifetime. I’m 83 right now, 84 in June, but I want to do it in my lifetime. I would love to find it in Helen’s time. I will never feel good about the work we’re doing until we find a cure.”
Sir Jackie’s call to action echoes that of Bruce Willis’s family - his wife Emma Heming, ex Demi Moore and his daughters Rumer, Tallulah, Scout, Evelyn and Mabel - who noted FTD is “a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone”. Early last year Bruce was diagnosed with aphasia, a cognitive disorder that affects communication, and announced his retirement from acting after four decades.
“Dementia is a curse,” says Sir Jackie, who employs five neuro nurses to look after his wife. “It gets worse, and eventually the person you once knew is not able to speak.”
For the three-time motor racing world champion, the worst possible outcome would be for Helen to become so ill she has to move into a specialist care home. It’s happened to a number of their friends - his best friend Sean Connery lived with dementia for two years before his death in 2020.
“I go to visit a lot of those homes. I don’t cry easily. But every time I leave one of those homes, I’m in tears. At the loss for the family, for the condition, for their pain,” says Sir Jackie, who has to take a breath to clear the emotion from his throat.
“Helen is still a beautiful woman,” he says proudly. “And we’ve been married for 60 years and we’ve had a great marriage. We’ve got two wonderful children and we’ve got nine grandchildren. And they all love their grandmother. So I’m hopeful that the publicity that is already being expressed globally by this very famous movie star helps to make people realise: it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve got, dementia absolutely destroys that person’s life.”
“Helen was my timekeeper, my lap charter, she didn’t go to the Grand Prix to look like a pretty lady. She went there to do a job for me and Ken Tyrrell and for the people I drove for,” he adds softly. “She was more than ‘only’ a wife and a mother. So this is why I’ve got to look after her in as deep and strong a way as I possibly can.”
If you need support or advice, visit raceagainstdementia.com
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