Stanley Tucci and Edie Falco’s taboo relationship explored: did he leave his wife for her?

The celebrity coupling of Stanley Tucci and his wife Felicity Blunt — the sister of his The Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily Blunt — is among the most endearing relationships in celebrity culture. But, when it comes to relationships, Tucci hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory.

His first wife was Kathryn Spath, who sadly died in 2009. But during their marriage rumors swirled about Tucci and his Broadway co-star Edie Falco. A lot happened between him and The Sopranos actor, and the timing was terrible.

How they met

Romances between co-stars, particularly ones who share intimate scenes, aren’t rare; neither are extramarital affairs resulting from them. And in the early 2000s, when Tucci and Falco landed on stage together, they were about to commit a common Hollywood faux pas.

Tucci married Spath, who was a social worker, in 1995. They had three children together, and Tucci was the stepfather of Spath’s two other kids from her previous marriage to Alexander R. Scott, the son of performers Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott.

Falco wasn’t married when they were cast together in the Broadway revival of Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Nor had she met Tucci, who had passed like a ship in the night when he graduated from the same college as her (Purchase College) before she started attending classes. In a 2018 Vulture interview, she said she saw some posters of him on campus, like he was “the captain of the football team that they all still talk about.”

By the time the play opened at the Belasco Theater on Aug. 8, 2002, they had grown close. Between rehearsals and probably sharing stories about their school, they spent a lot of time together. The fact that the show centered on a hookup between their characters likely didn’t help the sexual tension. In fact, it begins with them in bed together naked.

Falco explained to The New York Times this was for audience immersion, adding ”I trust Stan implicitly. He’s in love with his wife and has a family, so it’s not as weird as it might be were that not the case.” Yikes.

Tucci briefly left his wife for Falco

Celebrities had a little more privacy in the early 2000s, so it’s hard to say exactly when they officially began dating. But the end result was Tucci leaving Spath and being with Falco for a brief time. Whatever the start date was, the end came in 2004.

Falco told The New York Times Tucci had repaired things with his family and she also took accountability for the taboo nature of their relationship. “Because there’s no way for that to be a good thing. He’s a lovely man, and he’s back with his wife and kids, and I’m thrilled,” she said.

Tucci’s love life after the breakup

Tucci stayed married to Spath until the latter passed away from breast cancer in 2009 and has spoken about that grief as recently as 2021. However, he has said Spath would have wanted him to live his life instead of wallow.

Cue serendipity. When he was invited to Emily Blunt’s wedding to John Krasinski in 2010, his former co-star introduced him to her sister, Felicity, who was a literary agent. He thought their age gap was a little too large, with 21 years separating them, but ignored his fears.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, “I kept trying to break it off because I am 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.”

They married after two years of dating, and have been together ever since. Their sense of humor aligns, too, with Tucci making prodding jokes about Felicity returning home late at night in his book What I Ate in One Year, and choosing to believe her when she says it was work-related.

Though extremely online people took those comments way more seriously than they were intended, it makes sense that someone as… adventurous… as he is would choose to approach the notion of an affair with a comedic angle.