Crooked mouth, drooping eye and bulging biceps: The enduring appeal of Sylvester Stallone

It’s not one of Sly’s more glorious moments on screen. He is shuffling across a busy New York street, looking shifty, when he contrives to bump into a dishevelled man walking in the opposite direction. He makes off with the man’s wallet. The man gives chase. They run across Central Park. The man is neurotic, wheezing, well into middle-age and very out of shape. Somehow, though, he catches up with Sly, jumps on top of him, and threatens to beat him up unless the wallet is given back forthwith. Sly meekly complies.

The future Rocky and Rambo star is almost certainly the only character in the whole of movie history ever to have come off second best in a fight with a character played by Jack Lemmon. The film in question is The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), an adaptation of Neil Simon’s play about middle-class, midlife angst in Manhattan. Sylvester Stallone, who turns 75 in just over a month, has built his movie career on the basis of his physique. He is the “Italian stallion”, to borrow the nickname of the fighter he played in the Rocky films, and yet here he was, in this early movie, being beaten up by Hollywood’s puniest, most powderpuff leading man.

Such reverses and humiliations are part of the Stallone myth. The reason that audiences have rooted for him on screen for almost 50 years is that he is a true everyman. When he is knocked down, he gets back up. Stallone has never been especially talented as an actor. He isn’t the good-looking Cary Grant type who can charm audiences with his repartee. He rarely wins acting prizes although he was once voted “worst actor of the decade” for his 1980s action films. He doesn’t have much flair for comedy and nor does he have range. He is as plodding and predicable on-screen as Rocky Balboa used to be in the ring. Nonetheless, he is also one of the biggest and most enduring movie stars of his era. He has a blue-collar appeal that smoother, better spoken screen actors can only envy. He writes and produces many of his films. Adversity never fazes him. He is like the boy who had sand kicked in his face but then turned into Mr Atlas.

“A forceps accident at birth immobilised the motor nerves on the left side of my face, leaving me with a crooked mouth, a droopy eye and this famous locution of mine,” Stallone writes in a matter of fact fashion in his bodybuilding book, Sly Moves: My proven programme to lose weight, build strength, gain will power and live your dream. He wasn’t big and he wasn’t handsome. As a boy in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood of New York, he was picked on and teased.

The gauche and isolated kid grew up idolising movie stars like former bodybuilder Steve Reeves, famous for playing Hercules. His mother opened a gym where he could begin to pump weights himself. The muscles followed but the acting parts didn’t. At the start of his career, Stallone auditioned incessantly. He was almost always rejected or, at best, fobbed off with bit parts. The closest he came to an early career break was mugging Woody Allen on the subway in Bananas (1971) and playing a high school, leather jacket wearing rebel in The Lords of Flatbush (1974). Not that he liked to remember it but he also starred in the low-budget softcore porn film, The Party at Kitty and Stud’s (1970), later renamed Italian Stallion to capitalise on the success of Rocky.

Between roles, Stallone eked out an existence with a strange array of part-time jobs, everything, he later claimed, from “cleaning lion cages at the zoo” to “slicing fish heads”. It was all perfect preparation for his big break, Rocky, which he made when he was almost 30, after years of not getting very far.

The story of how Stallone insisted on starring in the film has long since become part of modern day Hollywood folklore. He refused to sell his script, which he claimed to have written in a three-day “coffee-drenched frenzy” unless he could play Rocky himself. The fact that he wasn’t an accomplished actor turned out to be irrelevant. He saw the long in the tooth boxer as a near mirror reflection of himself.

“I’ve always said Rocky is semi-autobiographical. Having grown up in the streets I knew a million down-and-outers. I knew what they ate, where they worked, how they thought. Most of all, I understood their broken dreams,” he later wrote. “I’m a guy who basically had to build himself up from scratch.”

It’s a classic American rags to riches story which went a long way to explaining his appeal. Audiences, particularly young males, found it very easy to identify with him. By becoming a star, it was as if he was living the dream on their behalf.

Not that Stallone ever really was the innocent everyman that he liked to pretend. He could be manipulative and ruthless. When he was making Rocky, he certainly didn’t show much compunction about borrowing the life story of real-life journeyman heavyweight Chuck Wepner, nicknamed the “Bayonne Bleeder” who famously almost went the distance with Muhammad Ali.

Wepner eventually sued Stallone. His account of their relationship (“28 years of frustrations, handshakes and broken promises”) portrays the star in a very different light to the gutsy underdog loved by fans.

open image in gallery

Over the last 45 years, Stallone has worked with many of Hollywood’s toughest and most notorious producers. His contract for Cannon boss Menahem Golan’s Over the Top (1987), in which he played an arm-wrestling truck driver, was reportedly drawn up on a napkin. He worked on The Expendables movies with the volatile and single-minded Avi Lerner, who helped revive his career.

In the late1990s, when his action movies were being panned by reviewers, Stallone sought some critical respect by taking a role as a lumbering, hard of hearing New Jersey sheriff in James Mangold’s Cop Land (1997). He was appearing alongside Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. “I always thought he was a terrific actor who’s made some bad choices,” Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, who was executive producing, commented about Stallone. The star, meanwhile, told TheNew York Times that appearing in Cop Land was “a cleansing and a purging and a reawakening of my interest in making movies” as if this was the cinematic equivalent of an enema.

Stallone gave up his usual $20m fee to take the role in Cop Land. His performance was respectfully received but the film (which Weinstein had tinkered with in familiar Harvey Scissorhands fashion) did only modest business. As director Mangold recently told trade publication Indiewire, Rocky and Rambo fans didn’t like it because it didn’t have the action they expected while cinephiles “ignored the film entirely because of Stallone’s involvement”.

It seemed that the star was condemned to keep on repeating himself. Audiences would accept him as Rocky or as traumatised Vietnam war veteran Rambo and not much else. Some of his action films may have flopped at the box office but even the worst of them had a profitable afterlife on home video. There were times in the 1980s when he seemed far more preoccupied with proving he was a bigger action star than arch-rival, Arnold Schwarzenegger, than with stretching himself as an actor.

As Stallone hits 75, his filmography still has a strange Peter Pan-like look. At a time when other stars from his era are checking into The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or playing characters wrestling with the afflictions of age, the septuagenarian is still making boys’ own action movies. It’s as if he is arrested in a permanent, testosterone-driven adolescence and is never allowed to grow up. He is involved in two new blockbusters, both due for release later this year. He stars in Samaritan as a craggy old superhero who re-emerges after having gone missing 20 years before. “Most guys in their twenties wouldn’t be able to do what Sly does in this movie,” the admiring director Julius Avery told Total Film of his venerable but still energetic lead. He is also voicing the man-eating fish-human hybrid, King Shark, in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad.

open image in gallery

On his most recent visit to the 2019 Cannes Festival, Stallone was in a wistful, nostalgic mood. He told the press that when he was starting out, he didn’t think he could have a movie career at all because of his speech impediment. He evoked an image of himself as a sensitive and troubled Tiny Tim-like kid, treated with disdain by casting agents who didn’t understand what he said.

The ageing star sometimes still looks like a little boy lost. He squeezed all the pathos possible out of playing Rocky Balboa again in the recent Creed films. The champ from the original Rocky movies was now an old-timer, “a chunk of yesterday” as he memorably described himself. He mentored the young fighter Adonis Creed (Michael B Jordan) while trying to cope with regret, bereavement and the ravages of age. This was Stallone uncut – raw and emotional. It hints at what he might have achieved if he had been more adventurous in his choice of roles.

For better or worse, though, Stallone has spent over four decades starring in precisely the same kind of action movies. In the process, the delinquent from Hell’s Kitchen has turned into a national monument – a working-class, Italian American answer to John Wayne. He has easily outlasted all those contemporaries who possessed the looks and talent he so conspicuously lacked. At nearly 75, he is still kicking butt... and that drubbing he received from Lemmon all those years ago is long forgotten.

‘The Suicide Squad’ is released on 30 July. ‘Samaritan’ is due to be released later this year