Sylvester Stallone
He has sad eyes and a crooked mouth. "I cannot be considered handsome in the classic sense of the term," the actor admits. His ability as an actor is so limited that he can only play himself. And since he has difficulties speaking, they frequently give him laconic characters, or who carry a match in their mouth to save themselves from words. With those cards, it was quite difficult to maintain star status through three decades. But Sylvester Stallone, "Sly" for his friends, has climbed the stairs of fame based on willpower, like Rocky, the character for whom he will go down in movie history.
Michael Sylvester Stallone was born on the wrong foot on July 6, 1946, in New York. A complication during childbirth caused paralysis of a facial nerve. Over time, this has become a characteristic trait that increases his charisma. His father, Frank, a hairdresser, and his mother, Jacqueline, a dancer, and showgirl, were an Italian couple forced to emigrate to the New World in search of a better life. But both argued continuously, so Sylvester had a difficult childhood. This explains why he was a troubled boy, expelled from various schools. Finally, they sent him to a boarding school for American boys in Switzerland, where he joined the theater group and discovered his acting vocation. Back in the United States, he enrolled in drama at the University of Miami.
Although when he finished his studies he was recruited for a couple of theatrical productions in the alternative circuit of New York, the truth is that it took Sly a long time to open a gap in the world. Although he wasn't hired for any role, the future Rocky was determined to hold out until the end of the first round. Instead of throwing in the towel, he devoted himself to writing scripts that he unsuccessfully sent to various production companies. To eat, he even intervened in P- movies, a dark step in his career. Despite everything, Stallone managed to get out of that underworld and was hired for No Place to Hide, a drama about violent students. Woody Allen gave him a very small role in Bananas, where he was one of the thugs trying to rob an old lady on the subway.
Throughout the 1970s, Stallone hadn't quite taken off, despite being given more and more lengthy roles, like Steve Carver's Capone gangster, or rogue 'Machine Gun' pilot Joe Viterbo, who he made life miserable for David Carradine in The 2000 Death Race, a B-movie sci-fi action film produced by Roger Corman.
Since he was a low-class actor, in real financial difficulties and his career seemed destined to last a short time, Stallone decided to capture his fight for the American dream in a script full of autobiographical elements. The protagonist was a small-time boxer, also Italian-American, determined to succeed at all costs. The first draft of the story, titled Paradise Alley, impressed producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, who after reading it rushed to meet with Stallone. They were both enthusiastic but demanded to change the title to Rocky and make the script a bit more upbeat. Stallone was so disenchanted at that time with the world of Hollywood that he captured that impression at the end of the film, which appeared originally ended with the protagonist leaving boxing because he wanted nothing to do with the shady dealings he had seen in his surroundings. The producers also wanted a star to play the protagonist, so they were slow to surrender to the evidence that the character was Stallone himself and that no one would embody him like him.
Although Rocky was shot in 28 days, with a modest budget (just over a million dollars), it became a hit with critics and audiences. He won three Oscars, out of ten nominations, in the categories of best film, director, and editing. Stallone himself was nominated for acting and writing (the only nominations of his career), a feat similar to what his character accomplished. In fact, he was the third person nominated for an Oscar in both sections, after Charles Chaplin, for The Great Dictator, and Orson Welles, for Citizen Kane.
“He is such an authentic character that people come up to me and ask about my boxing career. It's like people want to believe that Rocky really exists," Stallone explained. Rocky's training sequence, going up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is one of the most memorable moments in movie history, and Stallone became a huge star. So far, the saga has had five sequels of uneven quality.
Stallone next co-wrote with Joe Eszterhas F.I.S.T., about the misadventures of a 1930s Union man. Stallone himself would play the lead in the film, directed by Norman Jewison. Shortly after, Stallone would make his directorial debut with Hell's Kitchen, a drama about three Italian-American brothers. The script was also his, and as in Rocky, it introduced many elements from his own life.
In the 1980s, Stallone became the biggest action movie star. He began the decade playing Hatch, the goalkeeper in Escape or Victory, by the maestro John Huston. And then he starred in the drama Cornered, an adaptation of the novel 'First Blood', by David Morrell, in which Stallone played John Rambo, a tormented ex-combatant of the Vietnam War. Stallone imposed on the producers that a certain humanity be given to the character, who despite his mental alienation and his vengeful character did not go as far as directly killing any policeman as in the book. Although the film was successful, nothing presaged the exaggerated triumph of its sequel, Rambo, with a script by James Cameron that dispensed with dramatic elements, focusing on action and gratuitous violence. Despite its inferior quality, it was the highest-grossing film of 1985, after Back to the Future, and became a phenomenon that transcended the screen when President Reagan declared himself a fan of the film. "Rambo is a Republican," the late president even said. For his part, Stallone denied him. “I am not from the left. I'm not on the right. I am American,” he commented. The third part, in which Rambo helped the Taliban in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet invaders, reached heights of hilarity, in phrases such as "What you call hell, he calls home", pronounced by Colonel Trautman when warning their kidnappers that Rambo was going to go to Afghanistan looking for them and was going to kill them all.
But Stallone was not doing well in the sentimental field. After divorcing his wife, Sasha Czack, with whom he had two children, in 1985, he had a notorious but brief affair with model Brigitte Nielsen. After a time of extreme disorientation, it seems that he has ended up settling down with Jennifer Flavin, his current wife, with whom he has had three children. In addition, Stallone lavished himself on repetitive films, of very low quality and almost always with an ultraviolent tone that distanced him from the family audience, such as Cobra, the strong arm of the Law, I, the Falcon, Locked Up and Tango and Cash. After hitting rock bottom, with Rocky V, the worst installment in the saga, he decided to take his friend and rival Arnold Schwarzenegger as a model and try his luck in the field of comedy. But Oscary Stop! Or my mother's shoots were so discreet that they went unnoticed. Stallone was once again at the top, playing a mountaineer in Maximum Risk, with spectacular scenes thanks to the good work of director Renny Harlin. Next, he decided to take advantage of his pull for action cinema with films like Demolition Man, The Specialist, Judge Dredd, Murderers, and Daylight: Panic in the Tunnel, although he played one of his best roles in a police drama. , Copland. In this engaging James Mangold film, he was a mild-mannered sheriff, much like the Rocky character, who was given a chance at redemption when an internal affairs detective asked him for help investigating several rogue officers.
At the beginning of the new millennium, the public had definitively abandoned Stallone, who was beginning to have an advanced age for action cinema. He starred in increasingly worse titles, such as Get Carter, Driven, D-Tox (Killer Eye), or Shade, the Game of Murderers. He only had success as a secondary, with Spy Kids 3-D Game Over, where he played 'The Toymaker', a fearsome supervillain.
In 2006, Stallone turned 60, and he seemed predestined for early retirement. Popular and loved, he felt displaced from the cinema, but he still had the itch to try it one more time... All this inspired him to recover his most popular character, Rocky Balboa, written, starring, and directed by him, and with a greater autobiographical charge than its predecessors. “I have made this film to show people that life does not end at 40 or 50 years old. I am in better shape than when I filmed the first Rocky”, explains the actor. The bet has paid off so well that now Stallone is about to play his other favorite character, John Rambo, in John Rambo, which is scheduled to premiere in 2008.
