Stanley Tucci assumed he would never have another significant other after his first wife Kate died of breast cancer in 2009, but a young lady named Felicity Blunt changed that. The 65-year-old actor said his relationship with Felicity, 45, the older sister of Emily Blunt, 'just sort of made sense' despite the 21-year difference in their ages. They have been married since 2012.
'I wasn’t sure that I would ever remarry,' Tucci told Jenna Bush Hager on Thursday's episode of her Open Book podcast while promoting his new book What I Ate in One Year, per People. The Devil Wears Prada 2 star married Kate in 1995 and they had three children: twins Isabel and Nicolo, 26, and daughter Camilla, 24. Their marriage was considered a solid and loving one. But then Kate was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer in 2006 and three years later she succumbed to the disease at age 47, leaving Tucci a widower with three youngsters under the age of 10.
'I never thought I would have children again. And when I met [Felicity], it just sort of made sense even though there is this age gap of 21 years,' said Tucci, who recently revealed he has a photo of Kate meeting his future wife Felicity at The Devil Wears Prada premiere in 2006. Tucci and the London literary agent initially met in 2006 at the premiere of The Devil Wears Prada, and reconnected at Emily's wedding to John Krasinski in 2010.
'Obviously, I knew her family, or I knew her sister was one of my best friends. And we just hit it off,' Tucci added. 'We had a lot in common, even though we had nothing in common. And it just sort of stuck. But I think she changed my life in the sense that she gave me a sense of security. She gave my children a sense of security, and she's fun - she's fun to hang out with.'
Tucci, who overcame his own battle with tongue cancer in 2017 and is now cancer-free, went on to have two more children with Felicity: son Matteo, 11, and daughter Emilia, eight. Hager commented that 'fun is so underrated, by the way,' to which Tucci replied, 'It's so true. I mean, she's really fun, and she's incredibly positive, which I am not always. I mean, her mind is incredible. Her capacity to take in information, not just from a book, but from the world and process it and turn it into something else is just extraordinary. She's pretty cool.'
Felicity has been a driving force in Tucci's other careers as a writer and a cooking influencer. 'It completely changed my life. I mean, I would be sitting here maybe talking to you about a movie I did or something,' the Julie and Julia actor told Hager. 'But, no. Now I'm sitting here talking to you about a book I wrote, which, you know, spawned a whole bunch of other things. I think we were all shocked by the success of it. But what it did was it opened up my world completely, and it was the show, the show that I had done on CNN, that had changed things a bit already. But then, this thing just blew everything. Blew it all up.'
Tucci previously revealed in a 2023 interview with BBC radio how he tried to break up with Felicity in the early stages of their relationship due to his anxiety over their age gap. He feared he would 'feel old for the rest of my life,' but decided to stay with her because she was 'an incredibly special person.' 'Felicity has been so incredible taking on a widower and three children whose mother died,' he said. 'That's a huge thing, at a very young age, too. If anybody made things better for all of us, it's her. She's the one.'
