Although their romantic affair only started years later, Edie Falco evidently first developed a crush on Stanley Tucci before she even knew him — while she was getting her bachelor’s degree at SUNY Purchase, which Tucci had attended a few years prior. “He was like the boy who made good,” she told Vanity Fair in 2018. “The shining example of what we all wanted to be.” A few years later, the two would end up meeting while acting together on Broadway.
In 2002, Falco and Tucci first appeared together in a revival of Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny,” a play which started with the two leads in bed together — naked. However, it began as no big deal to either of them, who saw it purely as work. “There’s sort of no way to make an audience believe” that their characters weren’t having sex, Falco told the New York Times at the time. “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.”
Indeed, Tucci was married at the time, to the late Kathryn Spath, with whom he had five children – two of whom were Spath’s from a previous marriage. However, Falco’s faith in Tucci’s devotion to his wife may have been misplaced, as she would soon come to find out.
Nicki
