They’ve been married for 11 years now, but Stanley Tucci just admitted that he was unsure at first that his relationship with Felicity Blunt would work out. He even said in a recent interview that he “kept trying to break it off” with his now-wife, attempts that clearly didn’t take. The problem obviously wasn’t a lack of compatibility or chemistry. Tucci is 62 to Blunt’s 40, and he thought that their 21-year age gap was too wide.
Read on to find out why Tucci was afraid of their age difference and what convinced him to ignore his fears.
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Tucci and Blunt first met thanks to his role in The Devil Wears Prada. The actor starred in the 2006 comedy with his future wife’s sister, Emily Blunt. At the time, Tucci was married to his first wife, Kathryn Spath, who died in 2009 of breast cancer.
“[T]hat’s where I met Emily and we became friends,” Tucci said of the movie on the podcast WTF With Marc Maron in 2021 (via People). “And, actually, Felicity—Emily’s sister, my wife—she and Kate talked at the premiere that night and I have a photo of them together, which is so odd. And then many years later, I ended up marrying Felicity.”
Tucci and Blunt ended up reconnecting after Spath passed, at Emily’s wedding to John Krasinski in 2010. After two years of dating, they married in 2012.
Tucci was the guest on the July 2 episode of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, and he looked back on losing his first wife and starting a new relationship as he was grieving. He also admitted that he tried to cut that relationship short and why.
“I was kind of afraid to get into a relationship,” the Searching for Italy host said. “And I kept trying to break it off, because I am 21 years older than [Felicity] is and I didn’t want to feel old for the rest of my life. But, I knew this was an incredibly special person.”
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On Desert Island Discs, Tucci explained how well Blunt fit into his life and that of the three children he welcomed with Spath. When they got together, his kids were just entering their teens. Today, Nicolo and Isabel Tucci are 23, and Camilla Tucci is 21.
“Felicity has been so incredible taking on a widower and three children whose mother died,” Tucci 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.”
Today, the actor and literary agent have children together, as well: eight-year-old Matteo Tucci and five-year-old Emilia Tucci.
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Tucci has expressed how difficult it was—and still is—to have lost Spath. “It was hard. It was awful,” he said on Desert Island Discs. “You never really get over it.”
In a 2015 interview with the UK’s The Times (via ABC News), Tucci said that he “panicked instantly afterwards” when he proposed to Blunt.
“It was very hard to go on vacations at first, really hard to go with Felicity someplace. I felt guilty. It’s horrible,” he explained. “You always feel guilty.”
But he also talked about making a fresh start with Blunt, including moving from New York to England, where she is from.
“People here are just shocked. They are like, ‘Why did you move here? The weather?'” he said. “But I am so comfortable here. I didn’t want to continue living in Westchester [County, New York]. Once my wife passed away, I was there by myself and what was I doing? To me, this was the healthier option.”