FOOD or SEX?
Stanley Tucci walks into the members' section of the Olympic Cinema Club in Barnes, south London, chic, bespectacled and quietly, compactly sexy; 61 years old, with the bearing of a man classically trained in ballet (which he isn't). The room perks up around him. He’s just that sort of a bloke, imbued with a low-key charisma, an easy, gentle charm.
“Where shall we go? Shall we go here?” he asks, wafting me towards the nicest armchairs ranged round the nicest table, bathed in a sunlight I could have sworn wasn’t there before he arrived. “I’m so excited to meet you,” he says. I actually believe him.
I unleash my Dictaphone. “What do you want to know?” Stanley asks. I want to know why you're not fat, I say. He laughs, uproariously.
Mine is not as outrageous a question as it might at first seem. Stanley Tucci – star of stage, screen and little screen, of blockbusters (The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games, The Lovely Bones and Captain America), HBO spectaculars (Winchell, Fortitude) and his own cooking/travel show (Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy); Stanley the writer, screenwriter, internet cocktail-making viral sensation, multiple Emmy winner, best friend of Colin Firth – has just written a book, a memoir, structured around a lifelong love affair with food. And dear God! This man can, and has, and continues to eat!
“That’s the cruellest quest ion I’ve ever been asked!”
Stanley was born in 1960 in New York state, raised by Joan and Stanley Tucci Sr, first generation Italian immigrant parents – and his was a childhood of nothing if not food; incredible, plentiful, delicious food. Imaginative, creative meals, provided in spite of limited financial resources. “Food, its preparation, serving and ingesting, was the primary activity and main topic of conversation, adding that his mother’s greatest threat to him and his younger sisters, Christina and Gina, was, “Why don’t you go next door and see what the neighbours are having?”, a bleak prospect because the neighbours never ate as well as the Tuccis did. As far as young Stanley could see, no-one did.
