What was Frank Stallone Sr's profession? Sylvester Stallone opens up on trauma after his father grabbed him by throat during polo
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: In a shocking scene from his new Netflix documentary ‘Sly’, Sylvester Stallone, reveals that his father Frank Sr, who worked as a hairdresser, physically attacked him during a polo match.
The 77-year-old actor said he got a "certain kind of ferocity" from his father, Frank Sr, who died in 2011 - and that the shocking assault left him traumatized and never wanting to "see a horse again."
Stallone revealed in his documentary, “I was raised by a very physical father, you know? So I was no stranger to serious pain, and I think it just became, I’m not gonna break. No matter what he did, you know? I’m just not gonna break.”
The ‘Rambo’ actor and his brother, Frank Jr, provided an uncensored account of the corporal punishment they were subjected to by both their parents.
Sylvester, who was nationally ranked in polo at the age of 13, recalled a particular incident in which his father began "screaming from the stands" that he was riding the horse incorrectly.
“And finally I pulled the horse up to get ready for another throw, and he comes out of the stands, grabs me by the throat, throws me on the ground, takes the horse and walks off the field,” the action-star recounted.
“And I laid there and I went: ‘I never wanna see a horse again in my whole life,'” he admitted.
Sylvester Stallone’s childhood
Sylvester Stallone was born in 1946 in a New York City charity ward to working-class parents Frank Sr and Jackie Stallone, who had a severely contentious marriage.
Jackie, who subsequently rose to cult status as an astrologer, worked as a cigarette girl and was the principal breadwinner for her family at the time.
Meanwhile, Frank Sr was experiencing professional frustration as a barber striving to advance to the higher-paying post of a cosmetologist, per Daily Mail.
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Frank Jr, Sylvester’s younger brother explained, “Our father was also very self-conscious ‘cause I don’t think he was educated,”
He added, “Any kind of slight or insult would like, he’d go off.”
Frank Jr. went on to say that their mother, Jackie, who died in 2020 at the age of 98, was "pretty bad too."
He noted that she was skilled with an old hairbrush and a shower brush, and she had long, unbreakable nails. " She'd go: "Come here, you,"" he recalled.
Sly described his mother as "quite eccentric, colorful, very, very, very outspoken and unpredictable."
"I know I’ve got a certain kind of ferocity from my father, no question." the iconic action hero admitted.
Frank Jr further said that the relationship between their mother and father “was like clockwork,” recalled, “I’d be up in bed and you’d just hear them screaming and yelling. And I was petrified, ‘cause I mean, I could just feel the reverberation.”
Jackie and Frank Sr were so preoccupied with their arduous work lives and their failing marriage that their children took a back seat.
“The majority of the time, I was living in a boarding house,” Sylvester opened up on his early childhood years in New York, “Basically 12 months a year, never went home, ‘cause they just didn’t have time. They were both working.”
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“And people say: ‘Oh, you feel deprived and you weren’t nurtured.’ I thought, yeah, that’s true, and maybe the nurturing comes from the respect and love of strangers. To feel embraced and loved by an audience, it’s insatiable,” he explained.
But despite having achieved extraordinary success as a performer over the decades, Sly remarked wistfully, “I wish I could get over it…but you can’t.”
Things fall apart
Sylvester was five when his family relocated to Maryland, where Frank Sr believed he would have more career chances than in New York.
However, the marriage was already on the verge of breakdown and Jackie walked out on her husband not long after their move.
Following a messy divorce, it was determined that Frank Jr. would live in Philadelphia with his mother, while Sly would remain in the Maryland countryside with his father.
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Sly described living in Maryland as, “Complete country and crickets, pretty isolated, and there were only horses,”
“I’ve been...for some reason had an affinity with horses since I was five or six years old. Not good horses, just horses my father would buy - $20, $25.”
He said his father, “didn’t have much money, but somehow he got involved with a polo team, and everyone in polo had beautiful horses, great trailers, ranches. We had a dump. The horses, most of ‘em had medical problems. Some of ‘em, if you pulled ‘em up too quickly, they’d go blind.”
Sly, resilient as ever, began playing polo “but sandlot kind of polo, like low-level. But I learned. Anyway, I started getting better and better and better, and then when I was 13 I was starting to get ranked. I’m gonna get nationally ranked.”
Frank Sr. "wasn't liking that so much" after seeing his son succeed at something, and thus the throat-grabbing event occurred in the middle of a polo match.