Stanley Tucci secretly battled cancer three years ago - but says its unlikely to come back

Stanley Tucci battled cancer three years ago.

The 60-year-old actor has revealed he was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 after doctors discovered a tumour at the base of his tongue, which he says was too big to have removed via surgery.

While speaking to Virgin Atlantic's inflight magazine Vera, he was quoted as saying: "It was too big to operate, so they had to do high-dose radiation and chemo."

The ‘Supernova’ star admitted he didn’t want to endure the intense treatments at first, after seeing how “horrible” it was for his first wife, Kate Tucci, who died following a breast cancer battle at the age of 47 in 2009.

He added: "I'd vowed I'd never do anything like that, because my first wife died of cancer, and to watch her go through those treatments for years was horrible.”

Stanley also told Vera magazine his cancer is now in remission and is unlikely to return, although it has still taken its toll on his body.

He said: "[Cancer] makes you more afraid and less afraid at the same time. I feel much older than I did before I was sick. But you still want to get ahead and get things done."

Meanwhile, the ‘Hunger Games’ star said earlier this year he has never stopped mourning for Kate – with whom he has twins Isabel and Nicolo, 21, and 19-year-old Camilla – and admitted it will "always be hard" for the kids and himself to live without her.

Stanley – who also has Matteo, six, and Emilia, three, with second wife Felicity Blunt – said: “You never stop grieving.

“It’s still hard after 11 years. It’s still hard. And it will always be hard. But you can’t let it … and she would never want any of us to ever wallow in that grief and let it take over our lives. She would never want that. She wasn’t like that.”

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