• Faith: Christian - Catholic
• Career: Actor
• Birthday:  July 06, 1946

Sylvester Stallone is a filmmaker and actor who’s received numerous accolades, including a Golden Globe, as well as nominations for three Academy Awards and two BAFTA Awards. Stallone 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. Struggling as an actor for numerous years after moving to New York City in 1969, Stallone found gradual work in movies like “The Lords of Flatbush.”

He achieved his greatest commercial and critical success starting in 1976 with his iconic 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. He played PTSD-plagued soldier John Rambo in “First Blood,” a role he would play across five “Rambo” films. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, Stallone would go on to become one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors acting in action movies like “Tango and Cash,” “Cobra,” “Cliffhanger,” “Demolition Man,” and “The Specialist.” In 1984, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Stallone continued his established roles in “Rocky Balboa” and “Rambo” before launching “The Expendables” film franchise, in which he starred as the mercenary Barney Ross. In 2013, he starred in “Escape Plan” and appeared in its sequels. In 2015, he returned to Rocky again in “Creed,” in which retired Rocky mentors and trains former rival Apollo Creed’s son, Donnie Creed. The film brought Stallone widespread praise and his first Golden Globe Award, as well as a third Academy Award nomination, having been first nominated for the same role 40 years prior. Since 2022, he’s starred in the Paramount+ crime series “Tulsa King.”

Stallone was born in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City’s Manhattan borough in 1946, the eldest son of Jacqueline and Francesco Stallone. His younger brother is musician and actor Frank Stallone. Many of Stallone’s biographies indicate that his birth name is Michael Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone. In an interview, Stallone’s mother explained that she originally named him Tyrone because she admired the actor Tyrone Power, but Stallone’s father changed it to Sylvester. As a child, his nickname was Binky, but he chose to go by Mike after classmates started calling him Stinky. His middle name is an alternation of the Italian given name Gaudenzio, and he usually shortened it to Enzio.

What religion is Sylvester Stallone?

Stallone was baptized and raised a devout Catholic but stopped going to church when his acting career progressed. However, in 1996, he rediscovered his childhood faith when his daughter was born ill, and he again became a strict Catholic by late 2006. That same year, he was interviewed by Pat Robertson from “700 Club” and stated that he spent much of his previous time in Hollywood “losing his way” because temptation abounded but later put things “in God’s hands.”

However, in 2010, he told GQ magazine, “I’m pretty spiritual; I believe a lot in the spirit of man. I’m certainly not an atheist. I was baptized Catholic, but I don’t belong to a structured church. I have no opposition to it. I think there are great nuggets of knowledge in there, some wonderful rules to live by. Then the flip side is the amount of agony that’s caused.”