Sylvester Stallone: From Rejection to Stardom

Photo: Michael Schilling / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

At birth they used forceps to get him out. It was a tough birth, and it left him with a speech impediment and one side of his face paralysed.

It didn’t get much better after that.

His parents sent him away to a New York boarding house and visited once a month.

As an adult he wanted to become an actor, but hundreds of agents turned him down to his face. One said this:

The man he was talking to was Sylvester Stallone.

I’m reading his book, The Steps, right now and I highly recommend it. You’ll learn a lot about acting and the industry from it.

Here’s one thing worth noting:

He was working in a zoo mucking out the lions’ cages and got tired of it because he stank every day. So he got a job as an usher at a cinema.

He watched every film multiple times, every day, and made notes on why some scenes worked and others didn’t, why the audience cried or laughed, why they liked one actor over another, and much more.

He analysed everything he saw. Then he got a tape recorder (this was the 70s), recorded the dialogue, went home and wrote it out by hand.

It’s a good strategy.

At the weekend, when my new group of Ultimate Acting Programme students started, I gave them a list of films to watch and certain method actors to analyse. When you know what you’re looking for, you can learn a lot from watching skilled method actors.