Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone (; born July 6, 1946) is an American actor and filmmaker. He has received numerous awards and nominations, and is one of only two actors in history (alongside Harrison Ford) to have starred in a box-office No. 1 film across six consecutive decades. After struggling as an actor for a number of years upon moving to New York City in 1969 and Hollywood in 1974, Stallone won his first critical acclaim as an actor for his co-starring role as Stanley Rosiello in The Lords of Flatbush. He found gradual work as an extra or side character in films until he achieved his greatest critical and commercial success as an actor and screenwriter, starting in 1976 with his role as boxer Rocky Balboa in the first film of the successful Rocky franchise, which he also wrote. In 1977, he became the third actor in history to be nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor. Rocky has since been inducted into the National Film Registry and had its props placed in the Smithsonian Museum. Stallone's use of the front entrance to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the Rocky series led the area to be nicknamed the Rocky Steps, and the city has a statue of the Rocky character placed permanently near the museum. The character was also voted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Stallone's subsequent films were rarely major commercial successes unless they were Rocky sequels, and none received the critical acclaim achieved with the first Rocky. This changed with the 1982 action film First Blood, in which he portrayed the PTSD-plagued soldier John Rambo, a role he would play across five Rambo films (1982–2019). From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, Stallone would go on to become one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors by appearing in numerous action films that were commercially successful but often critically panned, including Cobra, Tango and Cash, Cliffhanger, The Specialist, and the better-received Demolition Man. Stallone saw a decline in popularity in the early 2000s but rebounded in 2006 with a sixth installment in the Rocky series and in 2008 with a fourth in the Rambo series. In the 2010s, he launched The Expendables film franchise (2010–present), in which he starred as the mercenary Barney Ross. In 2013, he starred in the successful film Escape Plan and appeared in its sequels. In 2015, he returned to Rocky again with Creed, in which a retired Rocky mentors former rival Apollo Creed's son Donnie Creed.