Adrien Brody (Actor)

Adrien Nicholas Brody (born April 14, 1973) is an American actor. He is known for his portrayal of Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski's war drama The Pianist (2002), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor at age 29, becoming the youngest actor to win in that category. He also became the second American male actor to win the César Award for Best Actor for the same film. He has starred in several other films and has received several other awards including nominations for a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.

1.85 m

Tall. White. Black hair. Green/hazel eyes.

Many people can't get pass his long/crooked nose - not realizing that's what adds to his distinctive face, that and his green/hazel colored-eyes. He can look nerdy and hot in a blink of an eye.

English, Polish and German

Classic rock music. Old vintage films. Unique or different people. Smoking. Riding his motorcycle. Working out.

To spend time mostly alone. People not from Hollywood though he respects his fellow friends and actors, but thinks Hollywood's full of fake people.

Early Life

Brody was born in Woodhaven, Queens, New York City, the son of Sylvia Plachy, a photographer, and Elliot Brody, a retired history professor and painter. Brody's father is of Polish Jewish descent; Brody's mother, who was raised Catholic, was born in Budapest, Hungary, and is the daughter of a Catholic Hungarian aristocrat father and a Czech Jewish mother,  although Brody says he was raised "without a strong connection" to either Judaism or Christianity.

As a child, Brody performed magic shows at children's birthday parties as "The Amazing Adrien". He attended I.S. 145 Joseph Pulitzer Middle School and New York's Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. His parents enrolled him in acting classes to distance him from the dangerous children with whom he associated. He attended summer camp at Long Lake Camp for the Arts in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Brody attended Stony Brook University before transferring to Queens College for a semester.

Taking acting classes as a child, by age thirteen, he appeared in an Off-Broadway play and a PBS television film. One day, Roman Polanski watched Brody's performance in Harrison's Flowers (2000), and then Polanski decided to offer Brody the leading role of The Pianist (2002). To prepare for the role, Brody withdrew for months, gave up his apartment and his car, broke up with his then-fiance, and took piano lessons for four hours a day until he could master passages from some of Chopin’s finest works. At 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) tall, he lost 30 pounds. The role won him an Academy Award for Best Actor, making him, at age twenty-nine, the youngest actor ever to win the award, and, to date, the only winner under the age of thirty.

He played Noah Percy, a mentally disabled young man, in the film The Village, by M. Night Shyamalan, shell-shocked war veteran Jack Starks in The Jacket, writer Jack Driscoll in the 2005 King Kong remake. He has also appeared in the BBC show Peaky Blinders and horror film, Splice. Has also collaborated with filmmaker Wes Anderson.