Stanley Tucci's breakthrough as a filmmaker was a movie about risotto
Before he fronted a food show, Stanley Tucci co-wrote and co-directed Big Night, a 1996 film about two Italian brothers trying to save their restaurant. His mother wrote a cookbook to go with it, the script won an Independent Spirit Award, and Roger Ebert likened the whole thing to a perfect risotto.
Tucci was born in Peekskill, New York, on November 11, 1960, and raised in nearby Katonah. His father taught art at a high school in Chappaqua; both parents trace distant roots to Marzi in Calabria, and the family spent a year in Florence in the early 1970s. At school his real passion was drama, performed alongside his friend Campbell Scott, son of George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst. At SUNY Purchase, where he graduated in acting in 1982, he is the one who shortened classmate Irving Rhames's name to Ving.
Dewhurst gave both young men walk-on soldier parts in a Broadway play in 1982, which earned Tucci his Actors' Equity card. He modelled for Levi's, debuted on film as a soldier in John Huston's Prizzi's Honor (1985) and spent a decade in supporting parts, from the gangster Lucky Luciano in Billy Bathgate to a role in Beethoven. The TV legal drama Murder One brought an Emmy nomination and then his exit when ABC reworked the low-rated show.
Big Night, made with his cousin Joseph Tropiano as co-writer and Campbell Scott as co-director, premiered at Sundance and cast Tony Shalhoub as his brother. Directing continued with The Impostors (1998) and Joe Gould's Secret (2000). Playing the columnist Walter Winchell for HBO won him an Emmy and a Golden Globe, and his Adolf Eichmann in Conspiracy (2001) earned a second Globe.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006), as Meryl Streep's loyal lieutenant Nigel, was a breakout; A. O. Scott wrote he had never been better. He consulted the retired FBI profiler John Douglas to play the killer in The Lovely Bones, which brought an Oscar nomination, and reunited with Streep as Paul Child in Julie & Julia. Food kept returning: a cookbook in 2012, a stake in a New York restaurant, and later the CNN series Searching for Italy, which won him two Emmys in a row.
Source: Stanley Tucci
