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Stanley Tucci reveals he was diagnosed with cancer 3 years ago

PARK CITY, UTAH - JANUARY 24: Stanley Tucci of 'Worth' attends the IMDb Studio at Acura Festival Village on location at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival – Day 1 on January 24, 2020 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images for IMDb)
Stanley Tucci opened up about his cancer battle. (Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images for IMDb)

Stanley Tucci revealed he battled cancer three years ago — a decade after losing his first wife to the disease.

The Hunger Games star shared his past health scare in a new interview with Virgin Atlantic’s Vera magazine, explaining that he had a tumor on the base of his tongue.

“It was too big to operate, so they had to do high-dose radiation and chemo,” he shared. “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.”

Kathryn Spath-Tucci, who Tucci married in 1995, passed away in 2009 following a battle with breast cancer. The couple share two children. Tucci also has two kids with his current wife, Felicity Blunt, the sister of his The Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily Blunt, who he married in 2012.

“The kids were great, but it was hard for them,” Tucci continued, sharing that he had a “feeding tube for six months.”

“I could barely make it to the twins’ high school graduation,” he explained.

Of cancer, Tucci shared that it “makes you more afraid and less afraid at the same time. I feel much older than I did before I was sick. But you still want to get ahead and get things done.”

In 2016, The Lovely Bones star opened up about struggling to care for his wife while she was fighting cancer, explaining to The Guardian that he feels he owes her an apology.

“We tried everything we could do to save her,” he said. “I wish that I could have done more and that I could have been with her at the moment she passed away. I couldn’t be in that room, because I knew it would be so devastating that I wouldn’t be able to take care of the kids after.”

Earlier this year, Tucci explained to CBS why mourning his late wife is an ongoing process.

“You never stop grieving,” Tucci said. “It’s still hard after 11 years. It’s still hard. And it will always be hard. She would never want any of us to ever wallow in that grief and let it take over our lives. She would never want that. She wasn’t like that.”