80-year-old Sylvester Stallone has just said out loud something he carried with him for nearly half a century.
In 1977, Rocky took home the Oscar for Best Picture, beating Taxi Driver, Network, and All the President’s Men. Stallone had written the screenplay and starred in it, even though the studio didn’t want him to. He was so convinced they wouldn’t win that when Jack Nicholson read out the film’s name, he thought it was a joke.
But two people were missing amid the applause: his parents. They didn’t attend the ceremony. They had divorced in 1957, when he was 11, and he went to live with his father, whom he describes as emotionally and physically abusive, according to his own account.
In an interview with CBS, Stallone summed it up this way: “It’s a volcanic moment, and then it was very sad”. He said that night he realized he would never receive that acceptance from them, and that the only love he felt at that moment was from the audience.