Sylvester Stallone opens up about a harrowing youth spent in a Pennsylvania psychiatric facility, decades of severe anxiety attacks, and a turbulent upbringing under violent parents in his upcoming memoir, The Steps, scheduled for release on September 29.
At 80 years old, Sylvester Stallone is stripping away the invincible veneer of his most iconic cinematic characters—Rocky Balboa and John Rambo—to reveal a lifetime shaped by psychological trauma, severe anxiety, and extreme parental abuse. In a wide-ranging interview published on September 26, 2026, the Hollywood star detailed the harrowing origins of his tough exterior, tracing it back to a childhood marked by abandonment and brutal physical punishment, alongside struggles with anxiety that began in his mid-thirties.
Confinement at Devereux Manor: Inside the Adolescent Punishment Ward
Before achieving international fame, a teenage Stallone endured what he describes as a living hell. By age 16, after being expelled from 12 different schools in Philadelphia due to behavioral issues stemming from severe bullying over a facial nerve injury he suffered at birth, he was sent away by authorities according to reporting from September 24, 2026.
He spent two years at Devereux Manor, a school for troubled adolescents in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, located roughly 64 kilometers from central Philadelphia. At age 17, Stallone was locked inside the facility’s punishment pavilion—an environment he characterized in his forthcoming memoir, The Steps, as an institutional psychiatric ward functioning as an isolation and detention holding zone.
Sylvester Stallone told La Nación that it was basically a psychiatric hospital that also functioned as a detention and isolation ward.
Inside that sector, Stallone encountered scenes that left permanent psychological scars. He recalled men screaming, walking around naked, wearing straitjackets, and sitting in their own waste, alongside individuals bearing the visible scar tissue of lobotomies. When a journalist compared the environment to the Milos Forman film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Stallone firmly rejected the analogy.
Sabes, cuando vi la película Atrapado sin salida, fue algo alegre y encantador. Todos eran personajes peculiares, de buen corazón y, ya sabes, empáticos. No. Todo lo contrario. Ese lugar era un infierno, un caldero de locura.
Physical Abuse and Emotional Abandonment at Home
That institutional neglect mirrored his early home life. Following his parents’ divorce when he was roughly 11 years old—an agonizing moment when he recalls clinging to his mother’s leg as reported by Infobae as she walked out—Stallone lived with his father in Maryland. Prior to that, as a very young child, he was placed in a boarding house where his parents visited only about once a month, an emotional void he later viewed with dark pragmatism.
Sylvester Stallone told Infobae that his parents were never affectionate, so this was actually a benefit compared to the place where he used to live.
Life with his father brought severe physical abuse. Disagreements frequently turned violent, executed with oversized hands that forced the young actor to learn how to dodge blows according to accounts gathered by Infobae. In one stark memory highlighted by Yahoo en Español Vida y Estilo, his father sent him to buy bread before church; after returning with nut bread instead of standard loaves after meeting friends, his father kicked him in the stomach and knocked him out before driving off to services.
Decades later, in his forties, Stallone confronted his father, telling him he wished they were the same age for three minutes so he could return the beatings—a challenge his father readily accepted at age 68 according to Yahoo en Español Vida y Estilo. Stallone explicitly connects the unyielding intensity demanded by that upbringing directly to the cinematic ferocity of his characters.
Sylvester Stallone told Yahoo en Español Vida y Estilo that when people ask him where he gets that ferocity to play Rambo, he answers that it is genetic.
Decades of Severe Anxiety Without Therapy
Behind the hyper-masculine screen persona lies a lifelong vulnerability to intense anxiety reported by Excélsior. Stallone suffered his first severe anxiety attack at age 36 while reviewing daily film rushes in a dark editing theater, experiencing a sudden rush of heat, hair standing up on his neck, and a terrifying sensation of impending death that sent him crashing to the floor as detailed by Contextotucuman.
Contextotucuman reported that Sylvester Stallone remembered it happened while watching dailies, when he suddenly started feeling strange and thought he was about to die, losing his balance and falling in a dark movie theater while feeling like he could not escape.
Those episodes persisted over the decades, triggered unexpectedly by high-density crowds during public outings noted by Contextotucuman, such as visiting an art exhibition with his wife, Jennifer Flavin, where rising crowd density forces him to seek out a quiet alleyway and collapse to his knees according to Excélsior.
Sylvester Stallone told Infobae that no, it is not going to help, because this does not disappear, noting that you cover everything up with subterfuge, ideology, intellectual this and that, breathing, and meditation, until that moment arrives late at night and poof, you are right back there and now you are plunged into anxiety.
