Sylvester Stallone has opened up about the painful emotions that overshadowed his career-defining night at the 1977 Academy Awards.
His film Rocky, which he wrote and headlined, won the Oscar for Best Picture and launched him toward Hollywood superstardom.
But in a recent interview with CBS, Stallone said the achievement was marked by the absence of his parents—a wound that has stayed with him over the decades.
Remembering the tension as the Oscar nominations were read, Stallone said he never expected Rocky to prevail. “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘There’s no way we’re going to win,’” he recalled. Even fellow writers competing against him approached him beforehand and insisted he would lose.
The actor, now 80, told People that the announcement left him feeling anything but triumphant. As the applause erupted, he said he wanted to disappear into his seat. “I didn’t feel elation,” Stallone explained. “I actually felt a little sad. I wanted it to be a celebration with my family—a moment when we could say, ‘We made it.’ But it wasn’t like that.”
“I realized that the only love I was really going to feel at that point in my life was the love of the people sitting in the dark,” he said, referring to the audience watching from the theater.
Sylvester Stallone has described the heartbreaking realization that followed Rocky’s Best Picture Oscar win; pictured September 28
The 80-year-old filmmaker said he felt “sad” when Rocky won Best Picture at the 49th Academy Awards
Rocky defeated Taxi Driver, Network and All the President’s Men to claim the night’s top prize. Stallone was also nominated for Best Actor for playing Rocky Balboa, but the award went to Peter Finch for Network.
During a CBS Mornings interview with Gayle King last year, Stallone acknowledged that he still struggles to accept that his parents chose not to attend the Oscars.
“It was a volcanic moment, and then it became very sad,” he said. After spending years feeling rejected by the people he loved, Stallone explained, reaching the Oscars without them made the pain impossible to ignore. “You realize that you’re never ever going to come to terms with this.”
“I still walk around with it,” he added. “I wish I couldn’t. I pray, I do everything, but it’s always there.”
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Stallone’s latest reflections come as he promotes his new memoir, The Steps.
Rocky beat fellow Best Picture nominees Taxi Driver, Network and All the President’s Men
In a conversation with CBS’s Tracy Smith at 92NY last week, Stallone recalled thinking, “Come on. This is a joke,” when Jack Nicholson announced Rocky as the winner; pictured as Rocky in 1976
Stallone has been promoting his new memoir, The Steps
In an interview with The New York Times ahead of the book’s September 29 release, Stallone also spoke candidly about previously experiencing an eating disorder.
The Hollywood star discussed publicly for the first time how the physical demands of his film career affected his relationship with his body and appearance.
“My physique was my armor,” Stallone said. When he looked at Rocky, he saw an ordinary, smooth-looking man and decided the character should gradually become more self-conscious about his appearance.
“I started thinking: Design your body like a jaguar or a cat,” he explained. “Not big like Arnold [Schwarzenegger], but more feral, aggressive, 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.’