Born July 6, 1946 in West Islip, Long Island, New York, Sylvester Gardendo Stallone was raised in northeast Philadelphia by his chorus girl mother and Italian immigrant father.
Even as a child he was fascinated by larger-than-life-heroes and lived in a world of fantasies and comic books. Sly says: "That eventually just guided everything that I ever wanted to do, which was to do something that was not your normal, everyday behavior. It was always fanciful. So, I would dress up as characters and go to school like that, which always kind of presented a problem with the class.”
Seeing the movie Hercules at a movie theater at age twelve channeled his focus into the man and idol he would eventually become. “From that day on, I never stopped becoming really conscious of heroism and being physically fit. I literally started working out that afternoon. I went to a junkyard and started lifting pieces of scrap. From that point on, it was always driven towards being different than I was. I was a very thin child, so I became very body-conscious.”
He began seriously pursuing his acting career after dropping out of University of Miami. His muscularity, in combination with his trademark sneer and slightly slurred speech (the result of a forceps accident at birth that cut a nerve in his face, leaving parts of his lip, tongue, and chin paralyzed), led to him being typecast as “the bully, or the thug, or the fella who was the mugger.”
Rather than getting discouraged about being typecast, Stallone reinvented and gave new dimensions to these characters which eventually led him to writing the screenplay for Rocky. “Rocky was conceived around 1975 when I thought, well…this is the way I’m perceived, but why don’t I try to take that character and give him heart and understanding in that–physically, on the outside he’s one way, but inside, he’s actually different.”
The rest, of course, is history. The original Rocky grossed $225 million worldwide, garnered the Academy Award for “Best Picture” and Stallone an Academy Award nomination for “best Actor.” From Rocky, to Rambo, and the many characters in between, Stallone has become an American icon. But his fantastically successful film career has been as much an inner journey, as an outer one. And this beautiful book of photos by world-renowned photographer and friend, Martin Mann, tells a story that Stallon's ambitions and private life are more remarkable than many know.
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