Stallone drafted Rocky in three days after watching a long-shot title fight
On March 24, 1975, a struggling actor watched journeyman Chuck Wepner take Muhammad Ali deep into their fight. Three days later Sylvester Stallone had a first draft of Rocky. He insisted on playing the lead himself, and the underdog film won Best Picture while earning him nominations for both acting and writing.
Stallone was born in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, on July 6, 1946. A forceps delivery accidentally severed a nerve, partly paralysing the lower left side of his face and giving him the snarl and slurred speech that became his trademark. Bullied as a child, he coped through bodybuilding and acting. A guidance counsellor suggested he might run a sorting machine or work as an assistant electrician on elevators; classmates voted him most likely to end up in the electric chair.
His early years in New York, where he moved in 1969, were bleak. Evicted and briefly homeless, he said he slept in the Port Authority Bus Terminal before taking $200 for two days' work on a softcore film out of desperation. He cleaned at a zoo, was fired as an usher for scalping tickets, and read Edgar Allan Poe at the library to sharpen his writing. In 1972 he failed even to get work as an extra in The Godfather, appearing instead as a barely visible background figure in What's Up, Doc?
Rocky changed everything. At the 1977 Academy Awards it collected ten nominations, and Stallone became only the third actor ever nominated for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay in the same year. Wepner later sued over the story and settled for an undisclosed sum. The Philadelphia Museum of Art entrance used in the film became known as the Rocky Steps.
He went on to play John Rambo across five films, reigned as one of Hollywood's highest-paid action stars from the mid-1980s, and launched The Expendables. Playing Rocky again in Creed in 2015 won him a first Golden Globe and another Oscar nod, four decades after his original nomination for the part. Only he and Harrison Ford have starred in a box-office No. 1 film in six consecutive decades, and his films have grossed over $7.5 billion worldwide.
Source: Sylvester Stallone
