Jackie Stallone, the mother of actor Sylvester Stallone, and best known to British viewers for her turn on Celebrity Big Brother, has died at the age of 98.
Jackie Stallone enjoyed a varied working life, employed as a circus aerialist in her teens, becoming a wrestling promoter in the 1980s with the TV series GLOW – the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling – and finding relative acclaim as a celebrity astrologer in the 1990s.
However, she will be best remembered by many for appearing on the third series of the Channel 4 reality series in 2005 alongside former daughter-in-law Brigitte Nielsen, who was married to Sylvester between 1985 and 1987, and with whom she had a fraught relationship. Stallone – who entered the house with the memorable line “Yeah, Jackie” in response to Nielsen’s shocked hello – was voted out after four days, following tension with housemates including Nielsen and horse racing pundit John McCririck.
On the show, she described the experience as leaving her “bored and sick”, and “the nearest thing to being confined to a nursing home”. Reflecting post-eviction on companion show Big Brother’s Little Brother, Stallone said that she “thought Madonna might be there … basically people who are intellectual, intelligent – what could you possibly learn from these people?”
Jackie Stallone was born in Washington DC in 1921. She became interested in fitness and gymnastics after her family lived for a time with bodybuilding pioneer Charles Atlas. Stallone became a circus trapeze artist in the 1930s, and hairdresser and a nightclub chorus girl. Later, she appeared on a daily TV exercise show in her native Washington DC – which led to her opening a women-only gym, Barbella’s.
Confirming his mother’s death on Facebook, her son Frank Stallone wrote that she had “died in her sleep as she wished”, describing her as a “a remarkable woman, working out every day, full of spunk and fearless … it was hard not to like her, she was [a] very eccentric and flamboyant person”.
Stallone was married three times, and had a daughter, Toni, who died in 2012. She is survived by sons Sylvester and Frank Stallone, and her husband Stephen Levine.
