‘There was no way I wasn’t going to make it’
Movie star Stanley Tucci opens up about beating cancer and finding love again
In Hollywood, there has never been an actor who is more perpetually present than Stanley Tucci. His cross-section of roles span from family favourites like The Devil Wears Prada and Captain America through to indie hits including The Lovely Bones, and though his résumé is impressive, he was rarely the main star.
That all changed in 2020, when Stanley, 60, went viral for posting an Instagram of himself making a negroni at his home bar during London’s first lockdown, and a generation of new fans were born.
His renaissance continued when his hit show Searching For Italy – part food, part travel and part love letter to his Italian roots – burst onto the small screen, beating Oprah’s bombshell interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to an Emmy.
“There was no way I wasn’t going to make it. I wanted to tell for a long time the story of Italy and the disparate cuisine in every region,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. Stanley had feared he wouldn’t be able to make the show after a battle with oral cancer, months of chemo and losing his sense of taste.
Now he’s brought out a memoir, aptly titled Taste: My Life Through Food, that seamlessly blends his own fascinating story of finding love, surviving loss, beating cancer and finding love again, with incredible recipes sourced from his own family and dishes he’s picked up on his world travels.
FOOD & FAMILY
Born into an Italian-american family just outside New York, Stanley says he rarely ate at restaurants as a child, and often tried to trade his eggplant parmigiana school lunches for fellow students’ peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches.
As a grown man with five kids of his own, he praises his own parents, Stanley Sr and Joan, for managing to serve homemade, often two-course, dinners every night, including his dad’s famous Friday night ragu (yes, the recipe is in his book).
Throughout his adult life, Stanley’s been known to cook stews and pastas to bring to his co-stars on set – and even admits to having a martini set-up in his Captain America trailer, where he could be found whipping up signature cocktails for co-stars Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell at the end of a long day on set.
Stanley has long been quiet about his private life, but in Taste, he recalls meeting his first wife, Kate, and their summers spent in Maine steaming lobster on the beach with her family and their kids.
Their love story, which began in 1995, was cut tragically short in 2009 when she died aged 47 from breast cancer, leaving him to single-parent their small children, nine-year-old twins Nicolo and Isabel, now 21, and seven-year-old Camilla, now 19. Kate also had two children from a previous relationship, which the couple raised.
“I loved her and always will,” he writes. “Her death is still incomprehensible to me and her absence is still unreal. I introduced my family’s recipes into our daily fare, and eventually, exactly like my [current] wife Felicity, Kate usually ended up making them better than I did.”
STAYING STRONG
A year after his wife died, Stanley attended the wedding of his The Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily Blunt to John Krasinski, held in one of his favourite parts of the world – Lake Como, Italy (the wedding was held at George Clooney’s home).
Stanley recalls that taking the train from Tuscany to Como was a trip he’d always talked about making with Kate, and despite his grief, he decided to go in her honour.
“I’d barely been away from my family for some time before Kate’s death, and it was a welcome respite,” he recalls. It was at this wedding he met the bride’s sister Felicity, a British literary agent, where “most of our discussion centred around food”.
After falling in love with her while plucking a pheasant in her London kitchen, Stanley married Felicity in 2012 – and they now share son Matteo, six, and daughter Emilia, three.
In 2017, when Felicity was pregnant with Emilia, Stanley forced himself to the doctor to investigate a shooting pain in his jaw, which turned out to be a large, cancerous oral tumour. “I was stunned to the point of almost fainting,” he says. “Kate had died after a horrid four-year struggle with cancer and thought of revisiting that was something I dreaded.”
While doctors were confident they could cure him, Stanley faced months of chemo and eating through a stomach tube – and risked his ability to eat or taste food being permanently impaired.
“I almost fainted again,” he admits. “My older children were very encouraging, however, I knew it was hard for them to see me so ill when not even a decade before, their mother had suffered similarly. It was evident that my being diagnosed frightened them... the trauma of losing a parent never fully disappears.”
‘Today, as I type this, I am almost completely healed’
Six months after his final treatment, Stanley flew from London to New York where his friend, actor Ryan Reynolds, accompanied him to his doctor, where scans showed he was clear of the disease.
“Ryan had tears in his eyes, as did the female doctors, but I know it was only because they were in such close proximity to him,” Stanley jokes. “Today, as I type this, I am almost completely healed.”