Sylvester Stallone is 80 years old. The tireless Rocky, the fearless Rambo, the unstoppable Cosmo—the list of his iconic characters goes on endlessly, with over 120 roles in his filmography.
The actor has Italian, French, Russian, and Jewish roots: his father was Sicilian, and his mother came from a family of Jewish emigrants who fled pogroms in the Russian Empire. His great-grandmother Rosa hailed from Odessa. She emigrated to the United States with her husband. Stallone himself is a devout Catholic.
His childhood was difficult and dramatic: at birth, forceps damaged his facial nerves, leaving the left side of his face—the lip, eyelid, and part of his tongue—semi-paralyzed. This made him a target for ridicule and bullying at school, where he earned the nickname Quasimodo. The inferiority complex that emerged took years to overcome. How much this hindered his path to an acting career is obvious without explanation. His youth was spent in poverty and persistent efforts to break through.
He first stepped onto a stage in Switzerland, at the American College, where he worked part-time as a coach. It was a student production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which ignited a new passion in him—acting. Returning to the US, Sylvester enrolled in the acting program at the University of Miami, from which he dropped out before graduating to take on Broadway. But agents only dared to offer him gangster roles—his facial injury was too apparent.
He supported himself however he could: cleaning cages at the zoo, tearing ticket stubs at a local theater, and working as a bouncer at a restaurant. He paid for housing irregularly and often slept at a bus stop. To buy food, he agreed to appear in a porn film. Attentive viewers can spot him as a homeless man in a subway car in Woody Allen’s Bananas and as a “dancing guy” in the film Klute.
One day, inspired by a Muhammad Ali fight, Stallone wrote a screenplay in just a couple of days that left producers thrilled—it was Rocky. They offered him $350,000 for the script but wanted a well-known superstar for the lead role. Struggling in poverty, with a wife expecting a child and having even sold his dog, Stallone refused to sell the screenplay—Rocky had to be played by him alone!
The producers had to give in. The film became a sensation, winning three Oscars and grossing over $230 million. Stallone became a superstar himself.
He began acting extensively, but he healed his soul through his second passion—painting, which he considers the best therapy, a refuge from the corrosive demons of the mind. All the unfulfilled complexes of his youth poured out here. There are many self-portraits where the artist distorts the left side of his face with strokes of red or even black paint.
Interestingly, his painted Rocky was far ahead of the one portrayed on screen: in the canvas In Search of Rocky, Stallone tried to define his character’s essence. He even gouged out the eyes with a screwdriver—wanting to convey suffering and blind longing. Later, working on this painting gave him new ideas for film scripts. His idols in painting are Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall. Experts describe his style as abstract and figurative expressionism.
Although he painted for himself, Stallone’s artworks soon gained success and were widely exhibited—for example, a retrospective of his works was held in St. Petersburg in 2013. Recently, one of his paintings sold for $850,000.
His second major passion is, of course, sports and a healthy lifestyle, which allows him to perform all his mind-boggling stunts in films himself. A heavy smoker since age 12, he permanently gave up the habit through sheer willpower for his role as Rocky. Even at 80, he trains five days a week, calling the gym in his garage his temple. His diet includes chicken breast, white fish, and turkey. In the morning, he has three egg whites with half a yolk, a rye toast, and oatmeal. For energy, he eats Greek yogurt and almonds.
An avid collector, he owns an impressive collection of luxury watches and cars. He spends his free time with his beloved wife Jennifer and three daughters at his estate in Palm Beach. As for his Hollywood fame, he treats it with skepticism, often using images of celebrities trapped in gilded frames in his paintings. Their faces are erased: the commercial image destroys a person’s individuality. One recurring motif in his canvases is clocks, symbolizing fleeting time and inevitable death. Another motif is male figures with shattered chests: the stronger the hero, the more vulnerable he is. In 2012, a heart attack took the life of his eldest son Sage—a blow that left a bleeding scar for the rest of his life.
The admiration and love of millions of fans around the world offer little consolation to an actor who has lived a life full of tragic contrasts, incredibly successful yet unimaginably difficult. Now, he enjoys immense wealth and luxury, things he could never have dreamed of during his harsh childhood.
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