Adrien Brody gave up his flat and car to play The Pianist
To become Władysław Szpilman, Adrien Brody vanished from public life for months, sold his car, surrendered his apartment and practised Chopin four hours a day while shedding 30 pounds. It won him the Best Actor Oscar at 29. He is still the only winner in that category under thirty.
Brody grew up in Woodhaven, Queens, after his birth on April 14, 1973. His mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, was born in Budapest and fled with her parents after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, reaching America via Austria in 1958 having lost most of her relatives in the Holocaust. His father Elliot, of Polish Jewish descent, taught history and painted. Brody says religion played little part at home. As a boy he entertained at birthday parties as The Amazing Adrien, then studied at the LaGuardia performing-arts high school.
By thirteen he had acted Off-Broadway and in a PBS film. Critics and Brody himself point to Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill in 1993 as the real break. Later that decade he appeared opposite Tupac Shakur in Bullet and won praise working for Terrence Malick and for Spike Lee. Roman Polanski saw him in Harrison's Flowers and offered him The Pianist.
His win in 2003 was unusual. He had been nominated at the BAFTAs, Golden Globes and SAG Awards and lost all three, so the Oscar came without any of the usual warm-up prizes; he did take France's César. More than two decades later he repeated the feat with a fuller sweep, winning his second Best Actor Oscar, plus the BAFTA and Golden Globe, as the Hungarian architect László Tóth in Brady Corbet's The Brutalist.
Between those peaks he became a regular in Wes Anderson's ensembles, from The Darjeeling Limited to The Grand Budapest Hotel. Television brought an Emmy nomination for playing Harry Houdini and another for a guest role in Succession, and he menaced the Shelbys as Luca Changretta in Peaky Blinders. On stage he debuted in London in 2024 and on Broadway in 2025 as the death-row prisoner Nick Yarris in The Fear of 13, earning an Olivier nomination. Time put him on its list of the 100 most influential people in 2025.
Source: Adrien Brody
