Sylvester Stallone

In March 1975 Sylvester Stallone watched Chuck Wepner last fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali, which almost nobody had expected, and wrote the screenplay for Rocky in a matter of days. He was a barely employed actor with credits you would have to go looking for. Studios wanted the script and did not want him anywhere near the lead; he turned down a substantial sum rather than sell it without the part. The film was eventually made for around a million dollars, which was very little even then.

Rocky was the highest-grossing release of 1976 and took roughly 225 million dollars worldwide. At the ceremony held in March 1977 it won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Film Editing, and Stallone was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay - only the third person to manage that particular pair for a single film, after Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles. He was thirty when it opened, and had spent most of the preceding decade being told no.

What he did with the opening was build two franchises and run them in parallel. First Blood in 1982 introduced John Rambo as a damaged veteran; the sequels made him something a good deal louder. In 1985 Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rocky IV arrived within six months of each other and finished as the second and third biggest releases of the year in North America. For most of a decade Stallone was simply the shape the phrase 'action star' had.

The then-and-now comparison is complicated by the fact that Stallone's body was always part of the text - Rocky is a film about what a man will do to himself. The later chapters are quieter than anyone expected. Rocky Balboa in 2006 reopened the story sixteen years after Rocky V. Creed in 2015 handed the franchise to someone else entirely and put Stallone in the corner as the trainer, which brought a Golden Globe and, nearly forty years on, a third Academy Award nomination.