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" The London Palladium welcomed a Hollywood legend last night (January 11) as Sylvester Stallone fielded questions from host Jonathan Ross and an enthusiastic audience for an entertaining &amp;#039;Evening with...&amp;#039;. Number one box office hits across each of the last five decades show Stallone as a star with big screen endurance, but this weekend&amp;#039;s West End appearance highlighted his skills as a raconteur. Spanning from his early student years in Switzerland right up to his forthcoming boxing return in Grudge Match, Sly took the audience from the highs of Rocky and Rambo to the lows of Rhinestone with charm, wit and charisma. He even treated the crowd to a great Robert De Niro impersonation, a Shakespeare recitation and sang &amp;#039;Too Close to Paradise&amp;#039; (from his 1978 drama Paradise Alley) with Ross. Digital Spy rounds up 10 of the best bits from An Evening with Sylvester Stallone below... 1. If Rocky Balboa is a hero to film fans, then who is Stallone&amp;#039;s equivalent big screen icon? &amp;quot;The most iconic fictional character for me was a very good actor, nobody probably knows him anymore, Steve Reeves in the Hercules films. He was probably the most perfect male specimen I&amp;#039;d ever seen. He&amp;#039;s the guy that got me interested. Then it was Kirk Douglas, what he was doing with The Vikings I thought was incredible, how he was deforming himself back then. That was really bold.&amp;quot; 2. Stallone, then a virtual unknown, sold the script for Rocky on the proviso that he starred in the lead role. Flat-out broke and holding out as the offers rose higher and higher, he described it as a &amp;quot;crossroads&amp;quot; moment in his life... &amp;quot;I was watching Mean Streets and Marty and all these different characters that I knew I could play. Then one night I saw a fight on TV with this guy Chuck Wepner against Muhammad Ali. He was being depicted as a bum. He knocked Ali down in the 14th, 15th round. I saw that and went, there&amp;#039;s my story... &amp;quot;In everyone&amp;#039;s life there&amp;#039;s going to be about 3 or 4 crossroads and that&amp;#039;s going to determine your course. I knew if we took the money I could have been very happy, no question. But I would&amp;#039;ve hated myself. They said we don&amp;#039;t want you, we&amp;#039;ll take you but they had about five clauses in there so they could fire me in the first week.&amp;quot;  3. Stallone calls the first and last Rocky films his favourites, and admits that he became &amp;quot;insufferable&amp;quot; after the success of the original... &amp;quot;I abused power. I was an authority on everything. If you had a disease to cure I&amp;#039;d tell you. If you wanted the history of movies I&amp;#039;d tell you. I became insufferable, I look at some of my interviews now and I wish I could go back and punch myself in the face. The press turned against me... &amp;quot;I kind of made Rocky III autobiographical. I had become really egotistical, much more vain than I had been. That&amp;#039;s what happened to Rocky. That&amp;#039;s why you go down in flames, you&amp;#039;re protected by agents and no one tells you the truth. It costs Rocky everything and he had to rebuild the eye of the tiger.&amp;quot; 4. Sly almost got to work with his childhood hero Kirk Douglas, but a script dispute meant they never met on-screen... &amp;quot;When I did First Blood I wanted him to play the Colonel. He said he&amp;#039;d be happy to be Colonel Trautman. On the set he comes down and says &amp;#039;I can&amp;#039;t do this script. We agreed on some changes.&amp;#039; I said we can&amp;#039;t, but what are the changes? He said &amp;#039;here&amp;#039;s what they should be: don&amp;#039;t take this the wrong way but at the very end of the movie I should kill you. And we see a cop car driving away and it disappears into the fog, a hand reaches up on the rearview mirror, we look up and see me wearing your head band.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  5. His rivalry with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the &amp;#039;80 and &amp;#039;90s was intense... &amp;quot;We just basically hated each other, but in a good way. You want to look for an adversary that makes you get up in the morning and give it all and leave nothing on the table. If the director says be there for 3 hours and it&amp;#039;s a 15 hour day you go, &amp;#039;Okay, if it&amp;#039;s going to turn out better than [Arnold&amp;#039;s movie]&amp;#039; We both agree... otherwise you don&amp;#039;t push too hard. It&amp;#039;s like two soccer rivals.&amp;quot; 6. Many big offers came Stallone&amp;#039;s way at the height of his fame, but which ones does he regret turning down? &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t think I was mature enough for Coming Home, which eventually won Oscars for everybody. That would&amp;#039;ve been interesting considering I&amp;#039;d done Rambo, you would have seen both sides of the Vietnam War. &amp;quot;I turned down Witness, which was great because I&amp;#039;ve never had a love affair with an Amish chick! The third thing was Rhinestone or Romancing the Stone and I don&amp;#039;t have to remind you which one I picked!&amp;quot;  7. Stallone took the lead role in 1997&amp;#039;s Cop Land to show his critics he could hold his own against some of Hollywood&amp;#039;s finest... &amp;quot;I was at a point where the criticism was starting to bother me because I started in the industry as a serious actor. People forget that in Rocky there was only six minutes of boxing in it, the rest was talking. &amp;quot;Jim Mangold had written a brilliant script, I basically put up my salary to fund the movie because I wanted to just prove a point. &amp;quot;I wanted to work with really good actors and just see how you hold up against them; Bobby De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert Patrick. It served a purpose, I wish it had been more successful but it&amp;#039;s just something I&amp;#039;m really glad I did because it made me realise what I wanted to do in the future. This is the direction I feel like doing now, there&amp;#039;s not much more I can do in action except explode!&amp;quot; 8. It&amp;#039;s unlikely that Stallone&amp;#039;s passion project, a biography of poet Edgar Allan Poe, will ever see the light of day... &amp;quot;I know that it&amp;#039;s not going to work unless it&amp;#039;s a different thing, unless there&amp;#039;s a hook to it. Like what they do with Sherlock Holmes, for example. I can&amp;#039;t do that, there are too many Poe scholars that would go berserk if you tamper with it. &amp;quot;Actors, artists, they have two faces - the public face and the private face... He&amp;#039;s a young goofy artist so I tried to write him as one of us, who happened to have this amazing ability. I&amp;#039;m still debating whether I should do it but I know in my heart of hearts that ship has sailed.&amp;quot;  9. Though the Rambo series may have &amp;quot;run its course&amp;quot;, Stallone will play Rocky Balboa again in Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler&amp;#039;s Creed. His ailing boxer will mentor Apollo Creed&amp;#039;s grandson (played by Michael B Jordan)... &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very interesting because people think it&amp;#039;s Rocky VII, it&amp;#039;s not, I have a supporting role. It&amp;#039;s great to be able to take that character, who&amp;#039;s not well, and he&amp;#039;s trying to pass on all his love and knowledge while he still has time. I think it can be a very interesting challenge.&amp;quot; 10. Stallone sometimes ponders his and Robert De Niro&amp;#039;s career trajectories, and if he should have made more &amp;#039;credible&amp;#039;, critic-baiting screen roles... &amp;quot;Now that I look back I really think that I&amp;#039;m proud to have been able to have played one character like a Rocky and have it still be important to people. And then Rambo, the darkest and complete opposite in negative light. I talk about this with De Niro, in Grudge Match we&amp;#039;re in the ring together and I say, &amp;#039;those Oscars aren&amp;#039;t going to help you at all&amp;#039;... &amp;quot;I know that I wasn&amp;#039;t brave enough. He was much more of a fearless actor early on. I&amp;#039;m doing Rocky and the next theatre over it&amp;#039;s Taxi Driver - he was there with the mohawk, bloody nose, that took some guts to do. I really admire that he just wants to keep going. It was great working with Bobby because he&amp;#039;s the complete antithesis of who I am. He&amp;#039;s modest, he&amp;#039;s quiet, he&amp;#039;s reserved and I learned a lot from him.&amp;quot;  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/feature/a543348/an-evening-with-sylvester-stallone-10-highlights-from-the-palladium/>