It’s been nearly 40 years since Brigitte Nielsen married Sylvester Stallone, and the actress says that her former husband doesn’t cross her mind often.
After all this time, Nielsen admitted that she has “no idea what that guy is up to. You move on, you know? You’re so busy doing other things that it can be like, ‘Wait, what was his name again?'”
The marriage, she explained to People, was “so long ago.” After marrying in 1985, the couple split in 1987.
“I never think about him,” she said. “Sometimes it feels like it never even happened.”
Nielsen, 60, and Stallone, 77, were married for just 19 months. They had a 17-year age gap – she was 22 when they met – and some speculated she was only with him for money, something she addressed in a 2014 interview with Oprah Winfrey.
“The biggest misconception while I was with Sylvester was the fact that everybody thought I married him because of money,” she said. “They didn’t understand that he begged me to marry. He begged me!”
She continued, “I remember thinking, ‘This is too early. This is not right.'” At the same time, everybody was going, ‘Who wouldn’t want to marry Rocky?’”
“If I would go back in time, I shouldn’t have married him,” Nielsen admitted. “And he shouldn’t have married me. I don’t want to s it here and come across as an angel. I probably was also a pain in the butt at times. . . . But it really just wasn’t for me, and it became very ugly, like some divorces do.”
Multiple reports stated that he was the one to file for divorce, but she has maintained that she’s the one who left him.
As she explained in the interview with Winfrey, “When I left Sylvester, all doors closed for me. No one wanted to touch me, and I was basically blacklisted.”
In 2019, she told The Guardian, “I was so angry at the time that I cut up my green card. I was pissed off. I said: ‘I’m not an American – screw that, I’m out of here!’”
A Denmark native, Nielsen moved back to Europe after the divorce to continue her career.
In the years since, she’s worked steadily as an actress and singer. She’s also worked in reality television, which is how she met another famous suitor, rapper Flavor Flav. They dated a year before calling it quits in 2005.
In 2006, she married her current husband, Mattia Dessi. The two share a five-year-old daughter, and she has four older children from previous relationships.
By the time Nielsen made an appearance in 2018’s “Creed II,” reprising her role alongside Stallone from “Rocky IV,” her feelings toward her former husband seemed to have softened. She previously told People that it was “incredibly emotional” to see him again.
“We are two professionals, and we kept it that way,” she explained. “He stayed in the American corner, and I stayed in the Russian corner. We were on opposite sides, but it was pleasant.”