Stanley Tucci reveals cancer diagnosis for the first time

Warmth, wit, and wisdom are the characteristics one might use to describe actor Stanley Tucci. His is an elegant charisma (as we very well know from those amazing viral lockdown videos) and he’s as refined off the screen as he is on it, which might explain why he chose to keep a health scare to himself before making the news public.

Speaking to Virgin Atlantic’s Vera, Tucci explained that he was diagnosed with a tumour at the base of his tongue. And, while he gently avoided talking about the medical care he received at that time, the actor did discuss the fears he felt during that period of his life.

These fears understandably felt far more pronounced due to the fact that his first wife of 10 years, Kate Spath-Tucci, passed away in 2009 after battling breast cancer.

“I’d vowed I’d never do anything like that [chemotherapy], because my first wife died of cancer, and to watch her go through those treatments for years was horrible,” he said.

“It was too big to operate, so they had to do high-dose radiation and chemo,” he said, before explaining how he “had a feeding tube for six months.” He is, thankfully, in remission now, and the cancer is unlikely to come back, but he said having the disease, changed him.

“[Cancer] makes you more afraid and less afraid at the same time. I feel much older than I did before I was sick. But you still want to get ahead and get things done.”

“You never stop grieving. It’s still hard after 11 years. It’s still hard. And it will always be hard,” he said, speaking of his first wife’s death earlier this year.

“But you can’t let it… and she would never want any of us to ever wallow in that grief and let it take over our lives. She would never want that. She wasn’t like that.”

In 2012, Tucci married literary agent Felicity Blunt, an English literary agent and the older sister of actress Emily Blunt, after the actress introduced the pair at her wedding to John Krasinski in 2010.