Rocky road to fame: The secret life of Sylvester Stallone, still Hollywood’s most durable action hero

He’s the sensitive Edgar Allan Poe-loving loner who once turned up at Cannes on top of a military tank; the Reagan-era Rambo, teasingly named “Thumbo’’ in his latest film, but still landing plum roles into his late seventies. As a testosterone-tinged Netflix show on Sylvester Stallone airs, Geoffrey Macnab looks back on his rip-roaring life and career

Sylvester Stallone as Barney Ross, a grizzled mercenary in ‘Expend4bles’ (Lionsgate)

Sylvester Stallone isn’t in the new Expendables movie for very long but he still gets many of its best moments. Dressed in a black beret, his character is Barney Ross, a grizzled mercenary who looks like a cross between a croissant-eating Left Bank artist and a Wagner Group veteran. We see him on souped-up motorbikes and behind the controls of planes and helicopters. He is also spotted in bars. The action ranges from US cities to Colonel Gaddafi’s old chemical plant in Libya and the middle of the ocean where a nuclear bomb is primed to go off.

When the aggro begins in the first few minutes, Stallone shirks the fighting, complaining that he has a bit of a bad back, and leaves Jason Statham, as his buddy Lee Christmas, to do the heavy lifting. Megan Fox as Lee’s CIA operative girlfriend Gina refers to him as a “caveman”, a description that he sheepishly seems to accept as pretty accurate given his age, hirsute appearance and violent lifestyle.

The filmmakers poke a little gentle humour at Stallone’s long-in-the-tooth Barney. His Samson-like powers are so diminished that he has recently lost a thumb-wrestling contest and has had to forfeit his precious Expendables ring. His friends have nicknamed him “Thumbo”, which doesn’t quite have the ring of “Rambo”.