Sylvester Stallone felt unloved when collecting his Rocky Oscar

DAILYMAIL.COM • 1h ago

By ASHLEIGH GRAY and CHRISTINE RENDÓN, US SENIOR REPORTER 20:40 04 Oct 2026, updated 21:07 04 Oct 2026

Sylvester Stallone has revealed the heartbreaking realization he made after his film Rocky won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Stallone’s legendary film received the top honor at the 49th Academy Awards in 1977, yet the moment was dampened after what he had hoped would be a joyous ‘family thing’ failed to manifest.

Stallone’s parents decided not to accompany him to the awards show and the actor, now 80, realized that the ‘only love’ he would be receiving at that time was from movie goers.

Stallone recounted the moment during an interview with CBS’s Tracy Smith at 92NY last week along with the moment his film was announced as the winner.

‘I’m sitting there, I go, “There’s no way we’re gonna win.” I even had people, believe it or not, other competitive writers, come up to me and go, “You’re not gonna win.” Flat out,’ Stallone said, according to an account from People.

He continued, ‘I’m hearing things… and then the applause went and…I wanted to like, sink into the seat. And I really did. It wasn’t as though I felt elation. I actually felt sad a little bit, because I wanted it to be a festive thing, family thing… like, “Okay! We arrived.” And it was like, nah.’

Stallone remembered about the Oscars night, ‘…I realized that the only love I’m ever gonna really feel at that point in my life is the love of people that are in the dark. You know what I mean?’

Rocky defeated nominees Taxi Driver, Network and All the President’s Men and remains a beloved Hollywood film.

The movie, which multihyphenate Stallone wrote and starred in, won three out of 10 Academy Award nominations.

But it was a bittersweet moment, as it highlighted Stallone’s strained family dynamic.

The star admitted in a CBS Mornings interview with Gayle King in December 2025 that he hasn’t been able to reconcile that his parents skipped the Oscars ceremony in 1977.

‘It’s a volcanic moment, and then it was very sad,’ he shared. ‘You want people that you love that denied you; now you’re here, you’re at the Oscars, and they don’t want to go…You realize that, at that moment, that you’re never ever going to come to terms with this…’

Elsewhere in his interview with Smith, the leading man referenced his troubled childhood, stating, ‘I have said it before – I just look at a child like an infant, like a pile of wet clay. And if you drop it two times, you put permanent dents. They don’t come out.’

He went on, ‘So you have to go through life with these problems and they don’t go away.’

I’m Andrew Court, LA Showbiz Editor and celebrity connoisseur.

I’ve spent the past decade chasing down celebrity scoops and scandals, and now I’m bringing the best of them straight to your inbox.

Speaking to The New York Times about his new book, published on September 29, Stallone got candid about previously suffering from an eating disorder.

The Hollywood superstar spoke publicly for the first time about the toll his films took on his body image.

He said of his physique: ‘It was my armour. I looked at Rocky: Very smooth, very normal-looking guy. And then I said, I think the character would start to become more vain.

‘So I started to think: Design your body like a jaguar, a cat. Not big like Arnold [Schwarzenegger] but more feral and aggressive, and very limber and athletic.’

He continued, ‘Then it got to the point where I became bulimic. You heard it here first. I got down to 2.6% body fat when I was doing Rocky III, and I couldn’t hold anything down.

‘Or I didn’t want to keep it down because I became so obsessed with staying at that point of fitness, literally an obsessive body-worship kind of thing.’

The actor admitted using steroids to bulk up his frame, adding: ‘Nobody does it without additives and drugs, period.

‘I don’t care what they say. It isn’t as though you’re a junkie, but if you’re going to work out and try to stay in shape for six months straight, and you’re eating yogurt and pudding, it’s not happening.’

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