Inside Stanley Tucci's Painful Journey With Cancer

Even knowing the truth about why Stanley Tucci hid his cancer diagnosis, it's still a little unsettling to imagine that he might not have been here to saunter back into Runway's offices in "The Devil Wears Prada 2" if the treatment hadn't worked. Tucci was diagnosed with oral cancer in 2017, following roughly two years of unexplained jaw pain that the doctors kept misdiagnosing. He even had a scan, but as fate would have it, it didn't pick up on the cancerous cells. When he was finally diagnosed, the cause of the pain turned out to be a 3-centimeter tumor lodged at the base of his tongue.

That placement was its own grim joke. Tucci revealed that surgery would've meant cutting away part of the tongue. Doctors instead put him through 35 days of radiation and seven rounds of chemotherapy that left him unable to eat for months. As a result, he lost 35 pounds and lived on a feeding tube for six months. Tucci had kept the whole thing private until September 2021, when he finally revealed it to Vera magazine some four years after the diagnosis. What makes this painful episode even more tragic for Stanley Tucci is that his first wife died of breast cancer in 2009, and the thought of getting treatment dragged him back into that grief. "I'd vowed I'd never do anything like that, because my first wife died of cancer, and to watch her go through those treatments for years was horrible," he said. Fortunately, he overcame that reluctance, and the treatment ended up successfully removing the tumor.

Most people, when faced with the prospect of mortality, might lose their nerve or succumb to dark thoughts. Stanley Tucci's battle with cancer was defined by another fear — the disease robbed him of his sense of taste. The American actor had built an entire second career as an evangelist of regional Italian cooking. He told The New York Times in September 2021 that radiation left food tasting like cardboard, and that was the moment he genuinely began to wonder if life was even worth clinging to "if you can't eat and enjoy food." From anyone else, that might read as melodramatic, but from the host of "Searching for Italy," it amounted to a full existential crisis that went beyond cancer itself. 

Recovery came slowly. Tucci had to relearn how to swallow and then taste. He credited his wife, Felicity Blunt (the sister of his "Prada" co-star Emily Blunt), for getting him through the darker days. "Felicity's undying attention, affection, and encouragement got me through it," he told People magazine in 2022. The treatment came with wicked side effects. Appearing on David Tennant's podcast in March 2025, Tucci revealed the radiation had destroyed his thyroid, leaving him on synthetic hormones. Despite this exhausting battle, the man remains unbowed, telling Tennant that it's "incredibly lucky" that he's still here with us. And with "The Devil Wears Prada 2," it's safe to say that his professional career is enjoying a renaissance, picking up Nigel's arched eyebrow right where he left it in 2006.