FOOD or SEX? “That's the cruellest question I've ever been asked!”

Actor Stanley Tucci’s lockdown videos and Emmy-winning food show turned him into a hot, midlife crush. Now he’s written a memoir about cooking, love and loss.

- POLLY VERNON

Stanley Tucci walks into the members' section of the Olympic Cinema Club in Barnes, south London, chic, bespectacled and quietly, compactly sexy; 61 years old, with the bearing of a man classically trained in ballet (which he isn't). The room perks up around him. He's just that sort of a bloke, imbued with a low-key charisma, an easy, gentle charm.

“Where shall we go? Shall we go here?” he asks, wafting me towards the nicest armchairs ranged round the nicest table, bathed in a sunlight I could have sworn wasn’t there before he arrived. “I’m so excited to meet you,” he says. I actually believe him.

I unleash my Dictaphone. “What do you want to know?” Stanley asks. I want to know why you're not fat, I say. He laughs, uproariously.

Mine is not as outrageous a question as it might at first seem. Stanley Tucci – star of stage, screen and little screen, of blockbusters (The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games, The Lovely Bones and Captain America), HBO spectaculars (Winchell, Fortitude) and his own cooking/travel show (Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy); Stanley the writer, screenwriter, internet cocktail-making viral sensation, multiple Emmy winner, best friend of Colin firth – has just written a book, a memoir, structured around a lifelong love affair with food. And dear God! This man can, and has, and continues to eat!