Sylvester Stallone credits wife Jennifer Flavin for 'survival' in Hollywood

Sylvester Stallone is crediting his wife, Jennifer Flavin, with sustaining him through the hardest stretches of his long career, offering an unusually candid reflection during a recent CBS News interview.

Speaking about his decades-long marriage, Stallone said, "She's just magnificent, has kept me alive. And it took me so long to turn my head around and go, 'Oh, you have the greatest gift in the world right here and you're looking out there, you fool!'"

The comments came as Stallone discussed his early struggles as an unknown actor in New York, a period now the subject of the documentary I Play Rocky, which chronicles his fight to get the original Rocky made and his insistence on starring in it himself despite studio pressure to cast someone more established. 

Reflecting on how he kept going through repeated rejection, Stallone said, "Because I consider there's a process of elimination," describing the script's creation as something close to divine intervention, having written it in roughly three and a half days.

Stallone and Flavin, a former model, met in 1988 and married in 1997, going on to have three daughters together: Sophia, Sistine and Scarlet.

Their marriage has weathered some public turbulence over the years, including a brief 2022 divorce filing that the two reconciled just weeks later. 

Flavin has continued to appear alongside Stallone in projects including the Paramount+ reality series The Family Stallone, and the two have spoken publicly in the past about the dynamics that have kept their marriage intact through nearly three decades together.