Bruce Willis was born in Germany in 1955 to a US military family. As a teenager he took up acting to help overcome his stammer and has starred in action films including Die Hard, Pulp Fiction and Armageddon. His films have taken more than 1 billion at the US box office.

He lives in Los Angeles and New York and has three daughters with former wife Demi Moore Go and watch the the latest instalment of the Die Hard film franchise and you will see, among other things, Bruce Willis, aka officer John McClane, successfully taking on a helicopter with a fire hydrant and later riding on the wing of a spinning fighter jet. Preposterous but brilliant, and at the age of 52 he pulls it off just. Hell, it was tough, he admits, I m old!

I got hurt a couple of times and picked up four or five stitches, but I m living testament to the fact that you can do a film like this and survive. But Willis says it wasn t as easy as it used to be. I had to put in some work to get my muscles to the size that they protected my bones so they wouldn t shatter when I dove onto the concrete floor.

I wish I d kept a running log of how much actual hide got scraped off. Still, he fared better than his younger stunt double: Larry Rippenkroeger suffered broken bones in his face and fractures in both wrists when he fell 25ft to the pavement. As one of Hollywood s good guys Willis made a point of visiting his double in hospital and picked up the tab for Rippenkroeger s parents to stay in a local hotel.

Willis claims that making the film was a way of warding-off middle age. I try to live and get as much fun out of life as I can, he says. I also enjoy diving and skiing, and I like to hang with my kids.

I do a lot of things, including drinking the odd martini from time to time. Since his amicable divorce from Demi Moore, he hasn t been short of potential suitors. As well as being pictured with a bevy of Playmates there was the recent kiss with Drew Barrymore (although he denies any romance), the nights out with rocker Courtney Love and the partying with all-round Hollywood wild child Lindsay Lohan.

You know, the bachelor thing is terrific, he says. I do lead a pretty fun life and I get a big kick out of it. He is certainly living it to the full.

As well as acting there s his rock band, Bruce Willis and the Accelerators, which will be back on the road in the US this summer, and there are the trappings of a bachelor superstar: the New York penthouse apartment, the Caribbean beach resort and the fast cars. I have a bunch of cars now, he says with his trademark smirk. I like to drive fast cars Corvettes, muscle cars from the 1960s.

I just drive out in LA where I can get up to well, let s just say I get up very high. Willis grew up in New Jersey, the eldest of four children and hampered with a stutter. After leaving high school he bought his first car, a 1964 Ford Fairlane.

I paid $600 for it that I d saved up from my spending money, he says. But rather than enroll in college, he took a job transporting work crews to a local factory. He quit after a colleague was killed on the job, and after various part-time jobs as a bartender and bodyguard he briefly enrolled in drama classes.

Then he moved to New York, tasting the big time by appearing in an episode of Miami Vice 23 years ago. After a failed audition to star opposite Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, he flew to Los Angeles where he auditioned for two roles, one of which was for the TV series Moonlighting. Beating 3,000 other actors to the role of smart-talking David Addison, his sexual chemistry with Cybill Shepherd made the show a massive success, catapulting him to stardom overnight and paving the way for a film career that would include Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction, Death Becomes Her and Twelve Monkeys.

The upward trajectory of his career can be judged by his pay cheques: for the first Die Hard film in 1988 he was paid $5m, for the second $7.5m, increasing to $15m for the third. In the latest, Live Free or Die Hard, in which his resourceful working-class cop John McClane takes on a gang of computer geeks, he was reputedly paid $20m.

Despite the cash, Willis gives the impression of someone with his feet firmly on the ground. Half the time I still don t know what I m doing and I m still learning to act, he says. And he doesn t have much time for our celebrity-obsessed times either: People know more about what Paris Hilton is doing today than what their congressman is doing.

Personally, I don t think my opinion means jack s***, because I m an actor. There are thousands of actors as good as me, and probably better, and none of us has anything useful to say. One area that has attracted almost as much media attention as his films is his split from Moore, the mother of his three children.

She has since formed a relationship with Ashton Kutcher, an actor 15 years her junior, but is often pictured on family days out with Willis in tow. Everyone finds that so hard to understand the fact I still love my wife and I know she loves me. We will always have a bond because we re raising our kids together.

Demi had a lot to do with it. She and I decided to take the high road and set aside any resentment and put our kids first. I don t know why people make such a big deal of it.

Life is too short to spend what little precious time you have alive being unhappy, and I think about that every day. I think it s the only way to grow old gracefully to try to keep that kid alive in your heart and pay attention to how fast time is flying by. Willis himself shows no signs of slowing down, and is even considering another child.

As a guy you can go on having kids; I d love a son. One of my mottos is to live it up. Early in life I lost friends in accidents; we know death is out there, waiting for us, yet most people are surprised by it.

So I try to live in the moment. On his CD changer I m a classic rock guy and like really loud music.Jimi Hendrix, left, is one of my all-time favourites.

I also like the Stonesand Motown greats as well as hip-hop and R B. My 15-year-old daughter Scout has got me into the Killers Bruce is the ultimate man's man; but even better, the woman's man. Glad to see the LF-DH movie had a plot associated with today's time.

It brought in the younger generation to a great series of timeless classics. Its been a while since I watched DH, but this movie made me load the video's and dust off the great one-liners. Not to mention driving like a maniac after seeing the film in the theater.

Bruce Willis was born in Germany in 1955 to a US military family.