A Walk of Fame ceremony for two in-laws at their peak: The story of Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci
When the actress married John Krasinski in 2010, the actor — who had just been widowed — reconnected with the sister of his co-star from ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’ The rest is history
If there’s one place in the world used to hosting special moments, it’s the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Premieres, parties, and celebrations have taken place for decades on its gray terrazzo tiles. But this Thursday, at 11:30 a.m. (Los Angeles time), a truly unique moment will occur: two actors will receive a star on the Walk at the same time. And they are not only colleagues, but also family — a rare combination. Londoner Emily Blunt and New Yorker Stanley Tucci will receive their honors at 6930 Hollywood Boulevard, in front of the iconic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. They will likely celebrate among colleagues, but also with family: they have been in-laws for more than a decade.
Blunt, 43, and Tucci, 65, have been brought here by long careers, numerous awards, and a string of successes (both have been nominated for an Oscar — he for The Lovely Bones and she for Oppenheimer), but also by nostalgia and fashion — elements that come together again in the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. The film, in which they play key supporting roles, arrives in theaters on Friday, perfectly timed with the ceremony. Its success remains to be seen — the first film, 20 years ago, grossed $326 million at the box office, 10 times its budget — but the international promotional campaign alone is already reflecting strong interest and its huge ability to draw crowds. This Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony serves as the campaign’s grand finale.
It has not been confirmed whether Meryl Streep or Anne Hathaway, the film’s leads, will attend the star ceremony. But there will be no shortage of famous faces: John Krasinski — actor, director, and Blunt’s husband — is expected, as well as Felicity Blunt, the actress’s sister and Tucci’s wife for over a decade. Their relationship, in part, even traces back to The Devil Wears Prada.
When the first film premiered in 2006, the cast was already walking red carpets around the world. Their lives were very different from what they are today. At 23, Blunt was a newcomer with just a handful of minor roles in TV series and films, until this movie launched her career. She was not yet dating John Krasinski, whom she would meet a couple of years later at a dinner in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Tucci was already a well-known actor and had been married to Kate Spath, a social worker, since 1995. They had three children together — twins Isabel and Nicolo (now 26), and a younger daughter, Camilla (now 21) — and were also raising the two children from Spath’s previous marriage to actor Alexander R. Scott.
As Tucci has explained in several interviews, his family learned that Spath had breast cancer shortly before he began filming the movie in which he plays Nigel, Miranda’s (Meryl Streep) loyal adviser. By then, Spath had begun her cancer treatments. She continued to accompany her husband to various events and red carpets, sometimes wearing a headscarf after losing her hair due to chemotherapy. In 2009, at the age of 47, she passed away.
Back in 2006, the Tucci–Spath family attended the premiere of The Devil Wears Prada. A young Emily Blunt brought her sister, Felicity, who was then 25. They all briefly met. Tucci recounted this on Marc Maron’s podcast in 2021: “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,” he said.
It wasn’t until 2010, at Emily Blunt and John Krasinski’s wedding, that Stanley and Felicity met again. The ceremony took place at Villa D’Este, a UNESCO World Heritage site on Lake Como in Italy. Tucci had maintained a close friendship with his former co-star from a few years earlier. It was then that he truly got to know Felicity. The connection was instant, and they married in the summer of 2012 in a small private ceremony. That September, they held a larger celebration in London attended by actors such as Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, and, of course, Meryl Streep.
As the actor and amateur cook explained, it wasn’t easy for him to fully commit to the romance at first. He was a widower with three children; she was a young woman of just 30.
“I was kind of afraid to get into a relationship, and I kept trying to break it off,” he confessed on a BBC podcast. “I’m 21 years older than she is, and I didn’t want to feel old for the rest of my life! But I knew this was an incredibly special person.” The couple has two children: Matteo, now 11, and Emilia, eight.
In an interview on the TV program CBS Sunday Morning about five years ago, Tucci spoke about the loss of his first wife. “It’s still hard after 11 years,” he acknowledged. “It’s still hard. And it will always be hard. But you can’t let it... and 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.”
He also reflected on grief in a conversation with the British newspaper The Guardian a couple of years ago: “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.”
His relationship with Felicity has brought him peace and happiness, as the actor, writer, and presenter often says. “We’re both sort of the same way, kind of romantic and then at the same time kind of cynical about it,” he told The Guardian.
The couple lives in south London, although they also spend time at a country house in the British countryside and in New York. Blunt, trained as a lawyer, has worked for more than 20 years in the British capital for the publishing group Curtis Brown, where she manages the literary careers of numerous authors, as well as her husband’s.
Tucci praises her in every talk and interview, also highlighting her courage in starting a relationship with him — a widower with three children — while she was much younger.
Things have not always been easy either, as he suffered tongue cancer, which took almost two years to diagnose, in 2017. He says he went through a great deal of pain and discomfort, and feared he might never be able to speak again or even eat properly — something especially distressing for someone so passionate about food, who has even hosted cooking programs in Italy, the country of his ancestors.
In the interview with The Guardian, he explained that during treatment (for which Blunt encouraged him, as he initially did not want to go through it), while being fed through a tube, he watched cooking shows endlessly, in a kind of inevitable torture.
Their children, Matteo and Millie, as Emilia is affectionately called, are close in age to the daughters of Blunt and Krasinski, Hazel, 12, and Violet, nine. That is why they often travel together and go on holidays as a group, as they have shared — quietly, normally, as a family.
In a 2016 interview with EL PAÍS, Emily Blunt said that the public often tends to idealize her private life, as it does with so many actors: “Because what’s shown is perfection. Perfect people, with perfect husbands and children on a red carpet. They don’t imagine that your children have tantrums; there are no pictures of that.”
At least, in their case, the children can run around with their cousins while their uncle prepares Negronis and a good plate of pasta.
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