Stanley Tucci Audiobooks

Stanley Tucci has spent four decades being the best thing in other people’s films. Born in New York state in 1960 to an Italian-American family, he arrived by way of John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor and became the character actor directors call when a part needs intelligence and menace in the same breath: The Devil Wears Prada, The Lovely Bones, which brought an Oscar nomination, Spotlight, The Hunger Games, Conclave.

The other career is food. He wrote, directed and starred in Big Night, a film about two brothers and one impossible dinner, and decades later turned presenter for Searching for Italy, which won him two Emmys and made a good part of the nation want to move to Puglia. Between the two came serious illness, treatment for oral cancer that briefly took his sense of taste away and gave his food writing its central question.

He is also, unusually for an actor, a genuinely fine writer on the page.

Taste is where to start and, for most listeners, where to stay. It is a memoir told through meals: a childhood kitchen in Westchester, the making of Big Night, film sets and their frankly terrible catering, then illness, and the long road back to tasting anything at all. Tucci reads it himself, and the voice is the entire point, dry, exact, occasionally delighted.

Its companion, What I Ate in One Year, is a diary rather than a memoir: one year of lunches, dinners, restaurants and family arguments, also in his own voice. Looser, more gossipy, and best enjoyed once you already like his company.

Both run under eight hours, which makes them ideal kitchen listening. The diary is arriving on the site in due course, so explore what is available below and check back for it.