Stanley Tucci opens up about 'terrifying' experience with cancer

The iconic Stanley Tucci, known for his roles in The Devil Wears Prada and The Hunger Games, has opened up about his love of food and how cancer left him unable to taste.

While many might remember Tucci for his iconic acting skills, the 63-year-old has in recent years become synonymous with food content through his social media and following the publication of a foodie memoir in 2021 titled Taste.

In the book, Tucci went into detail about being diagnosed with oral cancer in 2018 which left him “stunned”. He received a formal diagnosis after feeling pain in his jaw and seeking professional, medical help.

He wrote: “I was stunned to the point of almost fainting.”

Surgery to remove the cancer would also damage his sense of smell and taste permanently – which no one would want to go through but for Tucci, who loves food so much, it was extremely tragic.

“The only viable option was thirty-five days of high-dose targeted radiation and seven sessions of low-dose chemotherapy. Luckily, because [the tumour] had not metastasised, [the treatment] had a cure rate of close to 90 per ent with an extremely low rate of recurrence. Those were very hard figures to argue with. So, in the end, I did go through with it because I had to,” Tucci explained.

While Tucci’s fans and family, and the actor himself, are so grateful of the positive outcome, Tucci said it was very difficult to have cancer as his first wife, Kate, passed away after “a horrid four-year struggle with cancer” in 2009.

“The thought of revisiting that world again was something I dreaded,” The Devil Wears Prada star wrote at the time.

“[The grief], it’s always there. But if it were to stay as prominent in your life as it does at the beginning, you couldn’t function. You couldn’t take care of your kids. You couldn’t hold a job. You couldn’t do anything. So, whether we know it or not, we tell ourselves to let it go. And also the person who died would not want you to be that way,” Tucci recently said in an interview with The Guardian.

He also said that while he luckily went into remission after his cancer treatment, he “still has trouble swallowing, a side-effect from the radiation” but that Tucci feels that time in his life “is kind of vague”.

Following his wife’s death, Tucci found love again in Felicity Blunt – the sister of actor Emily Blunt – and they married in 2012. In the Guardian, he said that his wife was a huge support for him during his cancer treatment and forced him into it sometimes: “I didn’t want to do the treatment, because I knew a lot about cancer treatments. I’d seen it. I wanted to do alternative treatments. But Felicity was adamantly against it”

“There are big parts I don’t remember. Felicity will talk about that time I collapsed on the floor and I have no recollection. All I remember is being so fucking miserable and so nauseous I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow. It was awful. Then, eventually, slowly, slowly, slowly you get better,” Tucci explained.

He feels as if the cancer aged him “significantly” but he is continuing to enjoy life, currently starring in the spy-action series Citadel and even releasing a new foodie memoir earlier this week (October 10) titled What I Ate in One Year (and related thoughts).