Actor Sylvester Stallone once had a job as a lion cage cleaner.
Many of the most famous people in the world, started their careers at menial jobs, because like most humans, they had to eat to survive. Usually, those first jobs had nothing to do with their eventual claims to fame, but often they served as springboards to other and better things. Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, started out as a secretary in a financial services firm. "Do the best you can at any job you have, and be willing to work your way up," is her classic bit of advice. One wonders if Sylvester Stallone was listening.
Stallone as a child, was just what his movie image often projects, tough, stubborn and in trouble most of the time. By the age of 15, he had been expelled from 14 different schools. Without much in the way of academic credits, he followed his father's footsteps into the beauty business, and right back out again, having a distinct lack of talent for touch ups and permanents. Instead, he enrolled in drama at the American College in Switzerland. While there, a student production of "Death of a Salesman" dragged him off track and back to New York to pursue an acting career.
His mother, now a self-styled astrologist, had forecast that he would struggle seven years before finding success as a writer. So to keep himself in spaghetti and other pastas, Stallone took jobs cleaning lion cages at the zoo, selling fish, demonstrating pizza making, and as a movie usher, while he worked on a number of screenplays. Bit parts that came along only fed the flame, and he headed for Hollywood.
Hungry in more ways than one, he went to a fight with Mohammed Ali and a relatively unknown boxer, who still managed to last 15 rounds. When the fight was over, he had already developed the concept for "Rocky", which took three days to write. A number of film companies were interested, but Stallone insisted on starring in it himself. Eventually he found a backer, and the film was made in less than a month, on the thinnest of shoestring budgets. Which returned a huge payoff as the "sleeper" hit of 1976.
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