Don’t mess with Rocky. Sylvester Stallone completely denied Elton John‘s recent claim that the actor nearly got into a fistfight with Richard Gere over Princess Diana.
“Did you really fight with Richard Gere over Princess Diana at a party?” a fan asked in the comments section in one of Stallone’s Instagram photos on Wednesday, October 30.
“Total BS for him to sell books,” Stallone, 73, replied. “Total rubbish.”
In his memoir, Me, John, 72, claimed that while writing the music for the 1994 film The Lion King, he threw a party for then-Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and invited the Pretty Woman star, now 70, as well as the Rocky writer and the Princess of Wales.
“Straight away, Richard Gere and Diana seemed very taken with each other,” he wrote in his book. “She was separated from Charles by this point, and Richard had broken up with Cindy Crawford. They ended up sitting in front of the fireplace together, locked in rapt conversation.”
The “Candle in the Wind” singer said the mood in the room then changed.
“Judging by the kind of looks he kept shooting them, Diana and Richard Gere’s newly blossoming friendship was not going down well with Sylvester Stallone at all. I think he may have turned up to the party with the express intention of picking Diana up, only to find his plans for the evening ruined,” he added. “Eventually, dinner was served. We moved into the dining room and seated ourselves at the table. Or at least, most of us did. There was no sign of Richard Gere or indeed Sylvester Stallone. I asked David [Furnish] to go and find them. He came back with both of them, but he was wearing a fairly ashen expression. ‘Elton,’ he mumbled. ‘We have … a situation.'”
John then claimed that Furnish had found Stallone and Gere “in the corridor, squaring up to each other, apparently about to settle their differences over Diana by having a fistfight.”
The pianist smoothed things over, acting like he had no idea what was going on and Diana and Gere sat back down together in front of a fire. The Creed star then “stormed off home,” according to John. “‘I never would have come,’ he snapped, as David and I showed him to the door, ‘if I’d known Prince f–kin’ Charming was gonna be here,'” John wrote. “Then he added: ‘If I’d wanted her, I would’ve taken her!’ We managed to wait until his car was out of sight before we started laughing.”
