Sylvester Stallone

EARLY LIFE 

Sylvester Stallone was born on July 6, 1946 in New York City.

He is the son of Frank Stallone, Sr, a hairdresser, and Jackie Stallone (born as Jacqueline Labofish), a dancer.

Jackie Stallone is now a psychic who specializes in rumpology, or the reading of buttocks.

The lower left side of Sylvester Stallone's face has been paralyzed from birth resulting in his slurred speech.

Stallone's facial paralysis was the result of a doctor misusing tongs during his birth, severing the nerves in the newborn's lower left cheek.

Sylvester Stallone in 2012 By Georges Biard

When Sylvester Stallone was 15 years old, his classmates voted for him to be "most likely to die in an electric chair."

MOVIE CAREER

Sylvester Stallone's screen debut in Woody Allen's 1971 comedy Bananas lasted 76 seconds. He played a thug who intimidates Allen on a subway train.

Stallone was inspired to write the screenplay for Rocky after seeing 36-year-old Chuck Wepner take Muhammad Ali over 15 rounds in 1975.

Sylvester Stallone wrote the script for Rocky by hand in three and a half days. It was shot in 28 days, which Stallone compared to “the gestation time of a waterbug.”

Rocky, starring Stallone as the underdog prizefighter Rocky Balboa, debuted on November 21, 1976 in New York City. It was a huge box-office hit and received 10 Academy Awards.

Just before Sylvester Stallone sold the script for Rocky, he was homeless and sold his dog, Butkus for $40 to get food. A week later, he bought his dog back for $15,000.

During the filming of Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren hit Sylvester Stallone so hard that his heart banged against his ribs, sending him to hospital for nine days. Stallone's blood pressure spiked to 260, and he was told his injuries were like what would happen in a car accident.

The movie Predator was inspired from a joke that was going around Hollywood that after Rocky IV, Stallone would have to fight aliens as he had run out of all earthly opponents.

Stallone in 1983 By photo by Alan Light.

Stallone had another major success in 1982 when he played a Vietnam veteran named John Rambo in the action adventure movie First Blood.

John Rambo was named after a type of apple cultivated by a 17th-century Swedish settler named Peter Gunnarson Rambo.

Instead of making a film about Iraq or Darfur, Stallone made Rambo IV in 2008 about "lesser-known" Myanmar military atrocities.

In the first Rambo movie First Blood, John Rambo kills one person. In fact, the only death in the whole movie is an accident. In comparison, Rambo kills 76 in First Blood II, 132 in Rambo III, and 236 in Rambo IV.

After reading the script for Stop! Or My Mother Will Shoot, Arnold Schwarzenegger thought it was terrible. He leaked false rumors that he wanted the lead role in the film to the press in order to get Sylvester Stallone, with whom he had a heated rivalry at the time, to try to steal the role. It worked and Stallone starred in the critical and commercial flop, just to keep it from Arnie.