20. Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Stanley Tucci plays Maestro Cadenza in this recent version of Beauty and the Beast, a florid and neurotic musical star who, at the beginning of the film, is transformed into a harpsichord, while his wife, played by Audra McDonald, is mortifyingly turned into a wardrobe. A cartoony cameo-sketch playing on Tucci’s gift for uptight, diva-ish roles.
19. The Road to Perdition (2002)
A classic, and perhaps rather basic supporting character turn for Tucci, the sort of unpromising role that he invests with authority. In Sam Mendes’s 30s mob drama, he plays Frank Nitti, the Chicago wiseguy who has to reject an overture from Mafia footsoldier Mike Sullivan, played by Tom Hanks. A solid, but unremarkable Tucci turn.
18. A Modern Affair (1995)
A very rare example of Tucci getting an alpha-romantic lead role, in which his iconic baldness signifies old-school virility. He plays the philandering photographer who has donated sperm to a fertility lab, and then finds himself being (illegally) tracked down by the woman (Lisa Eichhorn) who has got pregnant by his seed and now wants to have a real relationship with the father of her child – to his bemused dismay.
17. Swing Vote (2008)
Here is Tucci in pure comic cynical-bad-guy role, the sort of thing that has been his bread and butter during his career, although he can do so much more. He plays the ruthless campaign manager of a US presidential candidate, played by Kelsey Grammer, who is horrified to learn that the poll is so close that it hinges on just one guy: an amiably clueless good ol’ boy, played by Kevin Costner, who isn’t sure how he’s going to vote. And so Costner’s innocence comes up against Tucci’s reptilian corruption. Some nice lines for Stanley.
16. A Little Chaos (2014)
Tucci roles divide into wig and non-wig and this, with Alan Rickman directing, is very much the first category. He is Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, the roguish brother of Louis XIV (played by Rickman himself), who wears a long flowing tonsorial creation under a similarly lavish hat. He also has a playful quasi-Brit accent to emphasise how louche and racy he is supposed to be, exchanging waspish badinage with everyone at court.
15. The Hunger Games (2012)
There have been some jaw-dropping wig roles for Tucci in his career, and this has to be the most outrageous, which also foregrounds his gift for the menacing and sinister. In The Hunger Games, he plays Caesar Flickerman, the smoothie blue-haired TV celebrity whose job is to interview the gladiatorial contestants (such as Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen) before they go out to face certain death. His creepy blue wig is complemented by fake teeth.
14. Julie & Julia (2009)
Nora Ephron’s film is the second (and less successful) pairing of Tucci with Meryl Streep. Here he plays Paul Child, a smart, discreet and very masculine character who is a US diplomat in Paris in the 1950s, married to the eccentric and forceful Julia Child, played, of course, by Streep. He is gently tolerant and affectionate about her search for a real pastime. When she becomes a star of cooking, he must take a back seat that’s even further back. Tucci handles this supporting role with gallantry and aplomb.
13. Monkey Shines (1988)
George A Romero’s horror classic gives Tucci a juicy but small villainous role. He plays Dr John Wiseman, the obnoxious, incompetent and philandering surgeon whose mistakes cause a law student to become paralysed. And when this man gets a trained monkey to help him with his daily tasks, he finds that this monkey can carry out acts of revenge, which is bad news for Dr Wiseman.
12. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
So many actors find that superhero roles are a career must, and perhaps Tucci will one day play a great supervillain. However, he had another potent supporting role in this MCU adventure, laying out the origin of Steve Rogers’s Captain America. He is Dr Abraham Erskine, a mysterious German scientist at a military recruiting station – and a refugee from the Nazis – who spots Steve and sees the potential in him.
11. Submission (2017)
Here is another of the louche, sexually calculating and slightly smug roles that Tucci knows so well how to play, bringing something unexpectedly sympathetic to the table – and it’s one of his rare lead roles. Tucci is the creative writing professor and failed novelist who is appallingly and humiliatingly attracted to a student, who submits to him – and there, incidentally, is the title pun – the first chapter of a novel she is writing. The chaotic sex scene is rich in disaster for this conceited middle-aged male.
10. Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Perhaps it was always Tucci’s destiny to play the quasi-Woody Allen character in a Woody Allen film, but he does it without an out-and-out impersonation, probably because Allen himself is in the picture. Tucci plays the writer Paul Epstein, who is, in fact, a character who has sprung from the mind of writer Harry Block (played by Allen) and clearly a cipher for Harry. Tucci has some nice scenes opposite Demi Moore, who plays his former therapist, now wife, who becomes an increasingly devout in her Judaism – although, again, Tucci is a little upstaged.
9. Spotlight (2015)
Here is another type of role that Tucci was born to play – the tough, overworked, slightly eccentric lawyer who takes on pro bono work to fight for the underdog; his hairpiece here has something frizzy, wiry and greying. Tucci plays the real-life attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who represented people who were abused as children by Catholic priests in Boston but then found powerful vested interests associated with the church were closing ranks against him. The press, in the form of Mark Ruffalo, ride to his assistance.
8. The Children Act (2017)
Tucci and Emma Thompson is a smart pairing, so much so that it is a surprise that they haven’t worked together more often. Here, he plays Jack, an academic, who is discontented with his marriage to Fiona, a workaholic high court judge, played by Thompson. Depressed by the declining intimacy in their marriage, but declaring his intention to be honest, he tells her he is thinking of having an affair – if that’s all right with her. It’s a strange, complex role: sympathetic in a way, but asking your wife’s permission for an affair is curious. Tucci carries the contradictions well.
7. Easy A (2010)
Here is the kind of seductive, persuasive, humorous supporting performance that is a keynote of Tucci’s career. In this comedy inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, Tucci plays Dill, the liberal, understanding father of a high-school student, Olive (played by Emma Stone), and married to Rosemary (played by Patricia Clarkson). As the parents, the two have a lovely chemistry. It is when Olive becomes the centre of gossip at her school that her parents (chiefly her mum) have to take an interest. Tucci and Clarkson have great family scenes in the kitchen and it’s entirely plausible that smart, funny Tucci is Emma Stone’s dad.
6. Margin Call (2011)
This JC Chandor drama about the 2008 financial crash features Tucci as Eric Dale, the head of risk analysis at an investment bank who is laid off at the very beginning of the film. The humiliation of a proud, difficult man is well conveyed by Tucci. But his character is in possession of a terrible secret that had been revealed by the research he had been doing: the bank is horribly overextended in its investment positions and could collapse at any moment. Eric is now caught between still wanting to warn people inside the firm, and being quite content to let the whole thing go.
5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999)
Tucci fans are crying out for the great man to be given a big Shakespearian role on screen: something like Claudius in Hamlet or maybe Brutus or Coriolanus from the Roman plays. Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a nice role for Tucci nevertheless. At the time, I thought Michael Hofmann’s version of the play, starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett as Titania and Oberon with Kevin Kline as Bottom, was a bit chocolate boxy, but it has a charm that I perhaps overlooked. Puck is a relatively innocuous figure in the film, and Tucci plays him as something like a Martian, but with tiny horns. Of course, Tucci has always been a Puckish figure in films generally, someone with a propensity for mischief.
4. Shall We Dance (2004)
Here is one of the outrageous Tucci comedy extravaganzas, one of the few films that really taps into his gift for broad humour, his physicality, and indeed makes a comic point about his legendary baldness. Tucci plays Link, the office colleague and pal of Bobby, played by Richard Gere. When Bobby signs up for ballroom dance lessons because he is in love with a woman there (Jennifer Lopez), he discovers to his astonishment that Link is a secret ballroom enthusiast and there is an amazing dance-contest scene in which Link throws away an absurd wig and, reinvigorated by his public baldness, dances a spectacular cha-cha-cha and pasodoble. The scene is cleverly shot to flatter Tucci’s dancing skills and his lean frame looks good in his figure-hugging catsuit with flame motif.
3. The Lovely Bones (2009)
Throughout his film career, Tucci has kept really villainous typecasting at a careful arm’s length, although on TV he notably played the creepy and possibly murderous philanthropist Richard Cross in Steven Bochco’s pioneering long-form TV drama Murder One and got a Golden Globe for playing the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the TV movie Conspiracy. In Peter Jackson’s movie version of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones he plays a serial killer – the murderer responsible for the death of Saoirse Ronan’s character, with whom he has an excruciating, all-but-unwatchable scene as he lures the innocent young girl into his lair. This is the performance that got Tucci his Academy Award nomination and perhaps it is precisely because Tucci always manages to get humanity and charm into his “bad guy” performances that he is a good fit with this role. His murderer is not just a cartoon sweaty creep but someone who could, however briefly and unconvincingly, convey something sufficiently amiable or avuncular to get away with his monstrous murders.
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
For many, this will always be the classic Tucci performance: at the age of 46, he nailed a glorious comic role that won the hearts of audiences young and old, male and female. He plays Nigel Kipling, the fastidious, quick-tempered, but warm-hearted art director who works at the super-prestigious Manhattan fashion bible Runway, effectively a lieutenant to Runway’s terrifying editor Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep. (The story was based on Anna Wintour at Vogue.) It is Nigel who has to explain the workings of the magazine to the wide-eyed newbie played by Anne Hathaway, and he appears to be the only person who is not totally terrified of Miranda. With marvellous brio and technique, Tucci shows us who Nigel is – the smalltown boy who idolised fashion at a young age and, for all his airy sophistication, is still thrilled, every day, to be working at Runway. But he is also the vulnerable, lonely man who is deeply hurt when Miranda appears to be grooming him for a top job only to take it away from him at the last moment for her own machiavellian reasons. A Tuccissimo film.
1. Big Night (1996)
The whole online world is thrilling to Stanley Tucci’s lockdown videos showing how to make perfect cocktails – but he has always had a certain theatrical savoir faire around a kitchen. And this foodie film has to be his magnum opus, the passion project he co-wrote and also co-directed with Campbell Scott, a longtime friend and colleague. Tucci himself starred with Tony Shalhoub (another close friend) playing two Italian immigrant brothers, called respectively Secondo and Primo, in New Jersey in the 1950s, who jointly run a restaurant called Paradise. Primo is the head chef and Secondo is the manager, and it is Secondo’s unhappy responsibility to deal with the clientele who are a little baffled and intimidated by Primo’s fiercely purist attitude to the authentic Italian dishes he is serving. Secondo figures they should be serving safer and more Americanised dishes as their competition do, and when a rival restaurateur kindly offers to set up a special promotional “big night” at Paradise featuring a visiting celebrity singer, Secondo jumps at the chance, little guessing that this man might have his own ulterior motive. It’s a big, generous, passionate role for Tucci, who sparks off Shalhoub well. He has a part hairpiece, indicating receding rather than a vanishing hairline, and we are allowed to see Tucci as a younger man: more idealistic, more vulnerable and even more boyish.