Sylvester Stallone, 80, Reveals Painful Family Secret He Kept Hidden for Years

Sylvester Stallone is opening up about his mother, Jackie, including the fact that he wasn’t at her funeral when she died in 2020.

Stallone found out she’d passed in a pretty jarring way. “I was playing golf and someone called, ‘Your mother’s dead,'” he recently told Page Six. 

When asked why he skipped the service, he first replied, “No,” before teasing, “Now you’re getting the scoop.”

Stallone, 80, is currently making the rounds to promote his new memoir, The Steps, which digs into the rougher parts of his life, starting with his childhood. According to Stallone, his mother once told him, “The only reason you’re here is because the hanger didn’t work.”

He also spoke about how she handled being a mother. “Some people just shouldn’t have children. And I think she knew that. She was very, very immature and she wanted to be a star …”

He continued, “She tried to be this palmist, this astrologist, this rumpologist (someone who claims to read people’s fortunes from their buttocks), she was a trapeze artist, she played piano. But she never reached out for her grandchildren or her children.” 

Jackie had three kids and seven grandchildren, but by the end of her life, she and Stallone barely spoke. “It got to the point where she just didn’t want to talk to me,” he said. “So she died in isolation.”

Stallone doesn’t appear to hold much resentment over his childhood. If anything, he believes those experiences helped shape who he became. “It’s the ones that have all the issues that usually end up being the most creative,” he said.

That determination changed Stallone’s life. In 1976, he wrote and starred in Rocky, which became the year’s highest-grossing movie and earned 10 Oscar nominations. But the role also came with a cost.

Speaking to The New York Times, Stallone said the physical transformation he put himself through for Rocky, and later Rambo, led to an eating disorder after years of steroid use in the ’80s.

“It was my armor,” he said. “I looked at Rocky like a very smooth, normal-looking guy. Then we said, if we move on, I think the character would start to become a bit more vain. And for Rambo, you’re playing a warrior; you’ll be a little bit more animalistic. So I started to think, design your body like a jaguar, a cat.”

“And then it became an obsession, really bad,” he added.

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