I wrote Rocky, but they offered me $360,000 NOT to be in it…Sylvester Stallone shares the wildest stories from his life of hard graft and grit

DAILYMAIL.COM • 3h ago

By NEIL ARMSTRONG 17:00 03 Oct 2026, updated 17:00 03 Oct 2026

Sylvester Stallone lasted only three and a half weeks as a lion cage cleaner. It wasn’t so much that the cleaning itself was difficult but that the powerful ammoniac stench of the lions’ urine made his eyes stream. Added to that, the reek clung to his clothes ‘as if I had the world’s greatest bladder problem’. He was also unnerved by the lions balefully gazing at him through the bars of the neighbouring cage. ‘The way they inhaled and exhaled made an eerie moaning sound like they already knew what I was going to taste like,’ he writes.

The Steps, the 80-year-old star’s first memoir, is his account of his life from 1969, when he returned to the US after backpacking around Europe and literally walked into the lion’s den in Central Park Zoo, to 1976, when Rocky, the story about a boxer that he wrote and starred in, was released and became a blockbuster hit. We also get some illuminating flashbacks about his family life.

I had no idea what to expect from this but it’s an absolute knockout; a hugely entertaining page-turner that is both funny and uplifting. Stallone, desperate to break into showbusiness, faces setback after setback. Agents, directors and producers are rude about the way he looks, the way he sounds and his acting ability. It all hurts. Stallone, despite his tough-guy build and demeanour, is a deeply sensitive soul with a head full of poetry. Yet, after every knockback, insult or slight, he simply picks himself up, gives himself a pep talk and carries on. He just won’t stay down. When he finally does get some breaks, I cheered for him.

He was born in July 1946 and the forceps used to deliver him crushed a nerve, paralysing the left side of his face, and leaving him with a crooked mouth and a slur. His family live in a grotty apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. Both parents are given to volcanic rages and always fighting. He craves their love but has a difficult relationship with both, particularly his mother. ‘She constantly reminded me that the only reason I was even alive was that the coat hanger didn’t work and neither did her bouncing down the stairs,’ he recalls.

Despite this, or maybe because of it, Stallone grows up to be resilient and determined. After his European jaunt, he rents a tiny room in a dodgy New York hotel. Virtually penniless, he showers in his clothes to wash them at the same time as himself. He lives off two tablespoons of cottage cheese and four raw eggs a day. He wants to be an actor, he studied drama at the University of Miami (he didn’t finish his degree), so when he’s not working in one of a series of dead-end jobs, he’s lucklessly trawling around the city’s talent agents.

He attends an open audition but doesn’t realise it’s for a musical. Asked to sing a song, he attempts the only number he knows by heart, a weird psychedelic epic rock song by Procol Harum, In Held ‘Twas In I. He doesn’t get the role. That’s fine, he writes, because ‘I needed to practise for failure … Rejection is your shadow at every step in this business.’

Eventually, things start slowly picking up. He gets a job as a cinema usher and records the films on a tape recorder. After his shift, he writes up all the dialogue, analysing why an audience laughs here or cries there. An aspiring actress called Sasha starts working at the cinema and she and Stallone hit it off.

He tries for a tiny part as a thug on a subway train in a Woody Allen film. Allen sees him approaching along the platform and whispers something to his assistant director, who tells Stallone he’s not intimidating enough for the part. Our hero rushes to a pharmacy, buys a jar of Vaseline and slicks back his hair. He then smears a layer of dirt from the subway wall on to his face and returns to the platform. ‘Woody Allen saw me coming toward him, then quickly lowered his eyes … Then, the God’s honest truth, I walked up to him, and said in my deepest voice, “How’s my ‘intimidation’ now?”’ He gets the part and it’s a turning point. ‘From that day forward, the word no became maybe.’

He starts writing his own screenplays, works with titles such as ‘Cry Full, Whisper Empty’ and ‘Promises Written on Water’. He thinks of each word he writes as a step in the right direction. The best of his scripts, about the life of Edgar Allan Poe, is good enough to get him an agent and to pique the interest of major directors.

He lands a role in a coming-of-age film called The Lords Of Flatbush and gets along famously with fellow cast member Henry Winkler, later to find fame as ‘the Fonz’ in TV comedy Happy Days. Winkler encourages his writing. However he doesn’t get on at all with another member of the cast, Richard Gere, and they come to blows. The film is only a moderate success but a review singles out Stallone for praise. ‘I finally knew I belonged in movies,’ he writes, and he makes the next move, heading to Los Angeles with Sasha.

Then we get to Rocky. Sasha is pregnant and the couple are broke. Stallone wants to write a script about a character who has one shot at achieving his dream; his life is a battle but he’s a fighter. Hang on, thinks Stallone, maybe he’s an actual fighter – a boxer.

Inspired, he writes Rocky in just three days. Sasha doesn’t like it. He rewrites it. Sasha loves it. His manager loves it. A couple of producers are interested. ‘OK, but there’s one thing,’ says Stallone. ‘I want to play Rocky.’ He’s told that’s ridiculous and offered $20,000 for the script. He refuses. $40,000? Nope. ‘We can’t sell a f****** ticket with you!’ one of the producers yells. Stallone won’t budge. $60,000? He and Sasha currently have $106 between them but Stallone is adamant. A few days later he’s told that James Caan, Ryan O’Neal and Burt Reynolds are among those interested in playing Rocky. Will he take $75,000? He will not.

The producers cave before he does. When he refuses an astonishing $360,000, he gets a call. He’s expecting to hear that the producers have pulled out. Instead, his manger tells him ‘YOU CAN PLAY ROCKY!’ Stallone falls to his knees and bursts into tears.

Rocky, a film written by and starring a virtual unknown, was the highest grossing film of 1976 and won three Oscars including Best Picture. The extraordinary story of its conception and making is as compelling as the movie itself. Oddly, an upcoming film called I Play Rocky, which also tells the story of the making of Rocky but is completely unrelated to Stallone’s book, is currently being tipped for Oscar glory.

Stallone has a wonderfully vivid turn of phrase – ‘After a couple of months, I could slice salmon and sturgeon so thin you could almost read through it’; ‘my singing would haunt a ship’ – tells a great anecdote, and knows how to tell a compelling story. I hope he is already writing the next instalment.

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