231027 Collection Digital Cover 1 - Flipbook - Page 74
“I’m completely in love with it here and can’t
imagine living any other place. Even the weather
doesn’t bother me that much.”
He’s an Oscar-nominated New York-born Hollywood A-lister who has
been in nearly 100 films and starred in more than a dozen plays both on
and off Broadway. He’s also won five Emmys, including two for his foodie
TV show, Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, and has also explored his
Italian ancestry through two cookbooks and one autobiography.
But Tucci is happiest in London, whether it’s dining out in what he
calls “a food mecca,” visiting West End theatres as a punter instead of
a performer (I’ve seen him at several opening nights, shorter than you’d
perhaps expect at 5ft 8ins but always dapperly dressed and affable with
star-spotters), listening to jazz at Ronnie Scott’s or spending downtime
with his family in Barnes.
Speaking before the SAG-AFTRA strike, the actor/writer/director
enthuses: “I’m completely in love with it here and can’t imagine living
any other place. Even the weather doesn’t bother me that much. Britain
isn’t without its faults. Many of its main issues have been self-inflicted
of late, like Brexit. There’s also the very limited upper-crust pool from
which British leaders are chosen. But on the whole, it’s a pretty highfunctioning country.”
He first came here in the early 1980s on an InterRailing trek around
Europe with Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $25 a Day as his guidebook.
Now he’s a resident, having moved here with his wife Felicity Blunt,
the literary agent sister of his The Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily.
Married since 2012, the couple have two children, Matteo and Emilia,
and Felicity is also stepmother to Stanley’s three daughters, Camilla,
Nicolò and Isabel, from his previous marriage to social worker Kathryn
Spath, who died from breast cancer in 2009.
Declaring himself to be a fully-fledged anglophile, 62-year-old Tucci
admits: “I never truly felt comfortable living in America.” The son of
a writer mother and art teacher father with roots in the town of Marzi
in the Calabria region of Southern Italy, he adds: “I am American, but
we lived in Italy for a year when I was a kid and, in many ways, I felt
more comfortable in Europe. America’s very uptight and it’s getting
more so.”
Of his adopted city, he raves: “I love it. It has so much to offer, the cultural
diversity is amazing, the NHS is an amazing thing. It’s great. It was a very
easy transition for me. It has all the great stuff New York has but it still
feels like a small town.”
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With his bald head, designer glasses and carefully maintained stubble,
Stanley would be easy to spot in a crowded street or bustling eatery. Then
there are the tailored suits and expensive jeans that mark him as a man
for whom sartorial elegance is a way of life. “I was brought up to dress
well,” he explains. “My dad was always nicely dressed. He went to school
every day in a jacket and tie.”
He’s all about classical comfort, although his career has often been about
pushing against comfort zones. Drawn to drama at school, he studied
acting at the State University of New York at Purchase liberal arts
college, where his teacher advised him: “Go beyond what’s comfortable.”
A valued supporting player in such 1980s and 1990s films as Prizzi’s
Honor, Billy Bathgate and The Pelican Brief, he also co-directed the
1996 dramedy Big Night (which was about the restaurant trade and
indulged his love of food) with his high school friend Campbell Scott.
There’s not enough space here to detail everything Tucci has done since,
but he’s worked with everyone from Woody Allen to Steven Spielberg on
screen, he was nominated for a Tony for the revival of Terrence McNally’s
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and he won an Emmy and
a Golden Globe for his turn as gossip columnist Walter Winchell in
the HBO biopic Winchell.
His portrayal of serial killer George Harvey in the 2009 screen
adaptation of Alice Seabold’s novel The Lovely Bones netted him a Best
Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars and he’s always balanced
popular entertainment like Captain America: The First Avenger,
Transformers: Age of Extinction and The Hunger Games franchise
with such serious fare as Spotlight, the self-directed Joe Gould’s Secret
and Steven Moffat’s hard-hitting TV drama Inside Man.
He’s had a blessed career, even if his personal life was rocked by Kathryn’s
death, which was followed by his own bout with cancer in 2021. He was
diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer and told an interviewer later:
“My late wife and I, we traveled all over the world trying to find a cure
for her. So, when I got it, I was completely shocked. I was terrified,
absolutely terrified.”
He went through “brutal” chemotherapy and radiation treatments
after a tumour was found at the base of his tongue. He lost 35 pounds
and his appetite. “I couldn’t eat. I had a feeding tube for six months and
everything tasted like you know what and smelled like you know what.
And it took months and months and months for me to finally be able
to eat again and then taste properly again.”
