Stallone practices his left hook in the first Rocky.

Sly and I are driving down a hill to his gym, the Compound, in a house in Beverly Hills. We come to a single-lane construction site on the road. Sly motions to the two women in the SUV facing us to move past his Mercedes. The SUV moves slowly so as not to nick Sly's car. He says, "Women don't have spatial relations. They can't parallel-park." When the SUV passes us, the women gawk at him. This is one of his problems as an actor. He can't hide from himself. He's so physically identifiable as Sylvester Stallone, even now at 60, that no matter what character he plays, the audience only sees Stallone the star, or, more accurately, Stallone as Rocky. When he went to Dodger Stadium one night, the fans saluted him with shouts of "Yo! Rocky!" Publicly, Sly has complained for years that his fans refused to accept him as any character other than Rocky or Rambo. Yet his good friend, the actor James Caan, says, "Sly became the very thing he dreaded. He wants to be an actor, but he doesn't know if he can. It's sad; he can't walk away from what made him or he'll disappoint his fans." Caan pauses, then adds, "Ya know, the greatest luxury in life is to fall on your face. Some guys won't take the chance. They stay in their comfort zone."

Today, Sly says he has made his peace with the burden of his recognition, but still, he thinks that's part of the reason why for so long he didn't have a career in movies. Sly's problem is that he still looks like the Sly of the Rocky years, with his black hair and distinctively droopy features that look less wrinkled than they do melted like wax.

"People think I dye my hair," he says, "but it's just good genes." His father, Frank, in his eighties, recently married a women 45 years his junior. She has Tourette's syndrome. When she visits Sly's three daughters — ten, eight, and four — with third wife, Flavin, a former model, she coos to the children, then shouts out obscenities. "I said, 'Jeez, Dad,'" says Sly, "'She's scarin' the kids.'"

Sly describes his father as "a frustrated singer," and his mother, Jackie, as "a bon vivant." Both parents spent more time pursuing their own dreams than worrying about their son's dreams when he was a child. His father was especially hard on him. He told Sly that his brain was "dormant." When he tried to teach Sly how to drive a nail in with a hammer with one stroke and Sly took three, he berated him. Sly snapped at him, "I'm not gonna hammer nails like you, get it?" His mother ridiculed his attempts at being an athlete. Sly says she was, and still is, a tough woman.

"She's taking trapeze lessons now," he says. He looks at me with a bemused smile. "According to her, she's only 61. I was a tough birth."

Stallone straps on his helmet for 1995's Judge Dredd.

Sly is only half kidding. When he was born, the forceps nicked a facial nerve which paralyzed the left side of his face, caused an eyelid to droop, and eventually slurred his speech. As a boy, his peers tormented him. So he withdrew and "spent my time daydreaming" of superheroes. When a skinny 11-year-old Sly saw his first Steve Reeves movie, he had an epiphany and began lifting weights to sculpt his body. But no matter how muscled his body became, it was just a veneer that hid a psyche filled with "inadequacies." He says, "Once you've been born an underdog, you always identify with that character." Sly's sense of victimhood is both justified and self-pitying. He's been abused like most people, but blessed like few.

The critics have not been kind to Sly since his first success, 1976's Rocky, which earned Sly 10 percent of its net profits. Once he became rich, Sly was determined to prove he was a versatile actor in a way that would define his career. He took on projects (F.I.S.T., Paradise Alley, Rhinestone, Oscar, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) that required dramatic or comedic talents he didn't have. When they failed, he reflexively churned out another Rocky or Rambo, which was what his fans and Hollywood moneymen expected from him.

The critics savaged Sly for both attempts. He was cartoonishly anguished when he tried to play drama, and inexpressively unfunny when he tried to play comedy. Stallone was confused. He was being criticized for trying to repeat his successes and, at the same time, for trying to distance himself from them. He felt he was being underappreciated for his efforts when he should have felt grateful for being overcompensated for them. The critics, and his fans, stereotyped him as Rocky or Rambo, and wouldn't accept him as any other character.

But the truth was that Stallone's limited range found its fulfillment in Rocky and Rambo, and nowhere else, except for one other role that, in a sense, was the real highlight of his career.