SYLVESTER Stallone says he's ready for a change. Sitting in the London branch of Planet Hollywood, the themed restaurant chain he part-owns, to promote Daylight, his latest stripped-to-the-waist, death-defying action blockbuster, the actor who gave the world Rocky and Rambo is relaxed and affable when he tells me that: "This project is probably my near-farewell to this genre. I'll do larger films but nothing of this magnitude, because I think I've mined this genre to the very core."

It's 23 years now since Stallone became a star with Rocky, the rags-to-riches boxing story that propelled him from supporting roles and bit parts to the Hollywood A-list. His career since then has been a series of ups and downs, the downs representing every attempt he has made to escape from the muscle-bound roles that have made him very rich. But the recent, successful hole-in-the-heart operation on his four month-old daughter Sophia has rejuvenated him, he claims.

"With the birth of Sophia and her near-fatal problem, it kind of reawakened all kinds of feelings. It cracks the scar tissue around your heart a bit, unblocks the clogged emotional arteries. I feel much like the way I felt when I did Rocky."

Sophia's mother, 28-year-old Jennifer Flavin, has had to put up with plenty of grief over the years from Stallone, who ditched her several times (once, memorably, by special-delivery post) for a succession of models. Now, though, apparently, he's totally in love.

"We'll be getting married in February. It doesn't get any better than this. What do you keep searching for with this Don Quixote mentality, this impossible dream? After having run the gamut of probably every private life excess you could possibly do, I finally hit emotional rock bottom. We are all flawed, and if you find someone who has less flaws than you, don't leave them. I want to spend a lot more time with my child, because I didn't do it so much the first time around. I was on the road so much, probably for at least of his 20 years.

First time around was his now 20-year-old son from his first marriage, Sage Moonblood (it's tough being born in the 1970s) who has a supporting role in Daylight. Did Sage have a happier childhood than his father, who came from a notoriously dysfunctional family?

"Oh my God, absolutely. First of all, there was never any competition between Sage and me. I always wanted him to be better, better, better. That wasn't the story with my father, just the opposite. I am amazed at how Sage has not got into drugs or become a delinquent, which unfortunately many celebrities' children do. I think he developed a kind of security there that I knew I never had. If our parents aren't good to us in those first five years, and don't set those standards, I don't think we ever catch up, I really don't."

Stallone's own turbulent personal life has been well chronicled over the years. His numerous sexual adventures, in particular, have provided ample fodder for the gossip columns. "If you're having any difficulties, they're blown out of proportion. It's very difficult on a celebrity's spouse - the constant bombardments, the rumours, the jealousies. I think quite often there are people who try to make things worse than they are. I can't tell you how many people I've apparently slept with this week - maybe 75, and I haven't even left the hotel!"

He sees the action genre as the modern-day version of ancient mythology. "Instead of Hercules or Achilles it's Arnold or Bruce. We're doing these extraordinary feats that really don't even border on reality. They're pure escapism, and it gets to a point where nothing is escaping from the performers in the way of emotions. It's repetitive. I'm going to try to get back to what got me into this business, which is all about relationships. I mean, if I never saw a gun again, who cares?"

Copland, an independently-produced thriller he made earlier this year with Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, is the kind of work he would like to pursue more. For his role in that film, he had to put on 35 pounds in weight, an experience he found traumatic.

"I had become addicted to exercise, to the point where it became a psychological hang-up, almost as addictive as bulimia or anorexia. To give that up, II felt as though I was giving up my entire identity, my security, my psychology. I found that in the first month I was making excuses to everybody: `This isn't really me, it's a performance'. Finally I realised that this was absolutely contrary to what the character should be. You are who you are. When you take the body out of the mix, it's a different world - then you really see what someone's made of. Anyone can have muscles, it's just application and time."

So are all those bicep-flexing, well-oiled torso shots a thing of the past? "What happened was I got caught up in the birth of a new genre in 1982, which was super-action. Up until then it had been adventure, then it became something completely different. I was swept away with this new toy and new technology."

IT'S not surprising that, at the age of 53, Stallone feels it's time to stop hanging out of helicopters, but every attempt he has made in the past to break with his image has failed. His forays into comedy in films like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot nosedived at the box office, and it took the formula action film Cliffhanger to revive his flagging career.

"Here's the truth on that. I know I'm never going to rid myself nor maybe do I want to, of the image of Rocky. That's a fact. I think that when I did a few films, in between action films, which did not work, that was to be expected. There's always going to be a backlash - it's like someone going from a Republican to a Democrat, from a Jew to a Catholic. So there's a mistrust and a scepticism. The trick is just to stay at it and be willing to take less money. It's an economic decision. People's fortunes rise and fall. You can make good films, and they just don't work.

"It happens to every actor. They all have a formula that they go by Tom Cruise has a very obvious formula, Harrison Ford has a certain thing that he does well, the same with Mel Gibson, and all these people have their pits and valleys. Mine have been much more extreme than theirs for the simple reason that none of them have been so closely identified with a Rocky or a Rambo. They've done certain movies, but they're not tied in to those characters. People don't necessarily say here comes the Terminator when they see Arnold, but when they see me coming, it's `Hey, Rocky!'."

Without Rocky, he believes, he wouldn't be sitting here today. "Something phenomenal happened that no one could have imagined with that film, and the irony of it is that it wouldn't be made now. When Rocky was up for Best Picture, you also had Taxi Driver, Network and All The President's Men. The studio heads have told me that not one of those movies would be made today. The business changed with Star Wars, with all that technology we'd never seen before. But I think there are no more diamonds left in that mine of action films. Everything's cyclical, and we have to go back. I believe the greatest film-making era of all time was the 1970s. If you. compare films like The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver to today there's no comparison. There's no characters today."

There are compensations, of course, like the $17.5 million which he received for Daylight, a curious amalgam of modern action picture and cheesy 1970s disaster movie. Stallone plays a disgraced fire chief sent in to rescue a group of survivors trapped in a tunnel under the Hudson river after a catastrophic explosion. Most of the film takes place in the dark, partly flooded tunnel.

"It was so difficult on the page, claustrophobic nightmare, and no one wanted to make it. It was the worst five months of my life. It was dangerous, everyone was unwell because of the noxious gases. I've learned to truly despise tunnels and enclosed spaces. There were rats defecating in the water. It was terrible, but I wanted to do it one last time.

"I'm not pretending that this movie hasn't been made before. It's just a reinterpretation. Love stories have been made before, but that doesn't mean you can't continue to make love stories. This film is kind of as close as I wanted to get to making Das Boot. Of course the beauty of Das Boot is that they're stuck in one area, so they can speak. We have to keep moving, but that was the prototype, to try to speak a little bit and vent our emotions, rather,, than just shouting at each other.

So, even with the proposed career change, we're unlikely to see Stallone cropping up in Woody Allen or Merchant Ivory films. "If someone offered me something like The Fugitive, I'd do it in a second, because I think that's an adult compromise. The next film I may be doing is called The Negotiator. about a hostage negotiator. It's largely verbal, with some moments of physical activity, but not that kind of grand, large-scale kind of hyperaction. That's not for me any more. I'll leave that to actually, I'll leave it to no one be cause no one wants to do it. When Arnold and I leave, there's going to be a big void."