Stanley Tucci Once Tried Breaking Up with Wife Felicity Because He Was 'Afraid' of 21-Year Age Gap

The actor said he "didn't want to feel old" for the rest of his life, but knew Felicity is "an incredibly special person"

Stanley Tucci was so concerned with the age difference between him and his wife, literary agent Felicity Blunt, that he once tried to break it off.

Tucci, 62, is 21 years older than Felicity, the elder sister of Tucci's The Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily Blunt. They married in 2012, three years after Tucci's first wife, Kate Tucci died in 2009 from breast cancer.

“I was afraid to get into a relationship and I kept trying to break it off,” Tucci said. "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 that this was an incredibly special person.”

In the years after Kate's death, Tucci was unsure if he was ready to get into a serious relationship, he told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs host Lauren Laverne. During the show, he chose to play Frank Sinatra's "A Foggy Day (in London Town)" because it was the song Tucci and Felicity chose for their first dance.

Related: Stanley Tucci Says His Wife's 'Undying Attention and Affection' Got Him Through Cancer Battle

Kate and Felicity met during the 2006 premiere of The Devil Wears Prada. They "talked a lot that night," Tucci recalled. Tucci and Felicity reconnected at Emily's 2010 wedding to actor John Krasinski.

“Felicity has been so incredible taking on a widower and three children whose mother died," the Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy host told Laverne. "That’s a huge thing, at a very young age too," he said. "If anybody made things better for all of us, it’s her. She’s the one."

Tucci has three children from his marriage to Kate, daughters Isabel and Nicolo, both 23 and Camilla, 21. He has two children with Felicity, son Matteo Oliver, 8, and daughter Emilia Giovanna, 5.

The Hunger Games star said the support of his friends and family helped him deal with the grief of Kate's death. "I didn't work for almost a year," Tucci explained. "It was hard. It was awful. Still is, in a way. You never really get over it."

Tucci also felt guilty "because I couldn't help her, and I thought I could help her," he told Laverne. He also revealed how he could not be by Kate's side at the time of her death, which brought difficult emotions to the surface for him.

"I was afraid it would affect me so greatly that I wouldn’t be able to go on and take care of the kids. That it would overwhelm me, so I had to step away," Tucci said. “Other people were there with her, my stepdaughter and friends, and that was a good thing. I did what I had to do to help the kids get along. But you still feel guilty about it, you feel sad."

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Tucci then introduced Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," which he said Kate asked to be played at her memorial. "I just loved that she picked this song because that's the way she saw the world," he said. "She was always, always upbeat, always saw things in a positive way, no matter what was happening."

In 2017, he was diagnosed with oral cancer, which left him "absolutely terrified," he told Today's Willie Geist on Sunday Sitdown in April. Tucci, who also told PEOPLE in 2022 he felt "incredibly lucky" to be alive after his own cancer diagnosis, was "so afraid" of treatments that Felicity and Emily "had to drag me kicking and screaming."

He admitted: "But I wouldn't be around if I hadn't done that."

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