Amanda Kloots Says She ‘Was Not a Good Wife’ to Late Husband Nick Cordero

Amanda Kloots is opening up about the regrets she has in her marriage to late actor Nick Cordero, who died in July 2020 after suffering complications from COVID-19 so severe he remained in a coma for months. In an interview with The New York Times about her upcoming memoir, Live Your Life: My Story of Loving and Losing Nick Cordero, Kloots admitted that despite all of her support during her husband’s sickness, “I was not a good wife.”

Kloots, who shares a 2-year-old son with her late husband, admitted she was not supportive of her husband’s desire to shift focus to his music career from acting and move their family to Los Angeles. The couple, who married in 2017 and welcomed Elvis in June 2019, was living in New York at the time, but the Broadway actor felt his career could take on a new life if they moved across the country. “I was not understanding any of it,” Kloots said of Cordero’s decision to focus on songwriting as opposed to acting, where he had made waves on shows like Blue Bloods. “I was like, ‘This is a waste of time, and we have no money.’ He did not feel supported by me. I wasn’t supportive.”

Kloots said she and Cordero fought for a year about potentially moving before she decided to compromise and follow him to the west coast. “I finally came to a place of, ‘This is marriage, you have to compromise,’” she recalled. The couple stayed in the guest house of Cordero’s best friend, actor Zach Braff, when they moved to L.A. in 2019, but soon after, the pandemic hit and Cordero was one of the first public-facing figures to contract the virus. Kloots said she “learned to appreciate his music too late,” and still struggles with feelings of regret about their last year of marriage, adding to the Times, “But I’m determined to keep his voice alive.”

Kloots drove Cordero to the emergency room on March 30, where he was diagnosed with COVID-19. “That was the last day I saw Nick as Nick,” she wrote on Instagram on the 1-year anniversary of that day. “My heart breaks today. I wish I could go back in time, run to him as he was walking away, grab him, kiss him and hold him in my arms. On April 1, he went on the ventilator and I never spoke to him again.”