Sylvester Stallone has spoken candidly about his difficult childhood, saying the experiences helped shape the person he eventually became.

Growing up in the 1940s, 1950s and ’60s, Stallone’s early life was difficult from the day he was born. Complications during his delivery meant doctors used two pairs of forceps, accidentally severing a nerve and leaving him with partial paralysis on the lower left side of his face. The resulting slurred speech led to years of bullying.

Things were made even harder by what Stallone has described as an abusive and neglectful upbringing. He says his mother – a celebrity astrologer and women’s professional wrestling promoter – never hugged or kissed him, while he recalls dodging forks thrown by his father at the dinner table and occasionally being punched in the stomach for minor mistakes.

‘It made me very tough,’ Stallone told The New York Times. ‘And I literally didn’t figure out real, true love until I was 70. To really have unequivocally true love, that total abandonment, that reckless love that you would jump into a volcano for someone, that came late. And that’s a big pity. I was so consumed with not being another bum from the neighbourhood. I was very, very competitive, like a pit bull. That’s what got me going. It’s not healthy.

‘I’m using “tough” as a masculine banner for something much more perverse and weird… And dark.’

Stallone also believes his birth disrupted his parents’ ‘grandiose plans’, derailing the ambitions they had for their own lives. As a child, he was sent to live in a boarding house, where his parents visited only once a month.

Looking back, he believes that arrangement may actually have been an improvement.

‘I don’t know if there was some preventive thing or some blockage from being completely abandoned, but I was just raised by strangers and it became a natural environment. My parents were never nurturing, so this was actually a bonus compared to where I was living,’ he says.

Later, after being sent to a school for teenagers with behavioural, emotional and neurodivergent differences, Stallone says he spent a couple of weeks in a psychiatric ward following an incident of misbehaviour.

‘You entered the heart of insanity. The smell, the filth, people running around naked, clawing, hands tied, drooling. This is what they thought would impress you never to break the rules again,’ he recalled. ‘I was there for a couple of weeks. It was wild. But this to me was one of the better things that happened, too. I said, I know they’re going to try to break me. I was attacked there.

‘When I came out of there and was standing before the school principal and he said, “You learned your lesson?” I said: “I learned a lot more than that lesson. A much better lesson: You can’t break me.”

‘So when I got to the city and everything that came after that, I always felt I was unbreakable in that way. My heart could be broken, like every human being, but I’m talking about will.’