Sylvester Stallone Hid His Struggles for Decades. Now He's Coming Clean.

Sylvester Stallone has loomed over popular culture for 50 years since Rocky Balboa, a role he wrote, won the best picture Oscar and launched the franchise. Decades later, at 80, he’s releasing a new memoir, The Steps, named after the Philadelphia Museum of Art stairs featured in Rocky. In interviews, Stallone frames his fame as something that affected his mind and body—saying he can “make a castle out of regrets”—and links his tough-guy persona to abusive, neglectful parenting. He describes mixed emotions revisiting painful memories, recalls childhood speech struggles, and comments that his parents may have viewed his arrival as disrupting their ambitions.