Adrien Brody

Adrien Brody

14 April 1973

An American actor and producer. Brody attended the 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 the 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. Brody hovered on the brink of stardom, receiving an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his role in the 1998 film "Restaurant" and later praise for his roles in Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam" and Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line". He received widespread recognition when he was cast as the lead in Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" (2002). To prepare for the role, Brody withdrew for months, gave up his apartment and his car, was left by his then-girlfriend, learned how to play Chopin on the piano, and lost 29 lbs (13 kg). The role won him an Academy Award for Best Actor, making him, at 29, the youngest actor ever to win the award, and to date the only winner under the age of 30. He also won a César Award for his performance.

As actor, producer

• New York Stories (1989)
• The Boy Who Cried Bitch (1991)
• King of the Hill (1993)
• Angels in the Outfield (1994)
• Natural Born Killers (1994)
• Jailbreakers (1994)
• Ten Benny (1996)
• Solo (1996)
• Bullet (1996)
• The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997)
• Six Ways to Sunday (1997)
• The Undertaker's Wedding (1997)
• The Thin Red Line (1998)
• Restaurant (1998)
• Oxygen (1999)
• Liberty Heights (1999)
• Summer of Sam (1999)
• Bread and Roses (2000)
• Harrison's Flowers (2001)
• The Affair of the Necklace (2001)
• Love the Hard Way (2001)
• Dummy (2002)
• The Pianist (2002)
• The Singing Detective (2003)
• The Village (2004)
• The Jacket (2005)
• King Kong (2005)
• Hollywoodland (2006)
• The Tehuacan Project (2007)
• Manolete (2007)
• The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
• The Brothers Bloom (2008)
• Cadillac Records (2008)
• Splice (2009)
• Giallo (2009)
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
• High School (2010)
• The Experiment (2010)
• Predators (2010)
• Wrecked (2011)
• Midnight in Paris (2011)
• Detachment (2011)
• Back to 1942 (2012)
• Inappropriate Comedy (2013)
• Third Person (2013)
• The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
• American Heist (2014)
• Dragon Blade (2015)
• Backtrack (2015)
• Septembers of Shiraz (2015)
• Manhattan Nocturne (2015)
• Stone Barn Castle (2015)
• Emperor (2017)

Quotations

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You'd be surprised how difficult it is relinquish a cell phone.

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I was a wild, mischievous kid, and I had tremendous imagination. Any experience I had, I'd try to reenact it.

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It's interesting, winning an Academy Award as a young man... life-changing, but I'm just me within that. It's been very helpful for my career, but I'm trying to stay on the path I was on before.

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What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.

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My dad told me, 'It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success', and it took me seventeen and a half years.

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I always had an actor within me.

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I grew up without a lot of money and my parents grew up with far less money. And that's kept me in line. Really in line.

* * *

It's great when people appreciate your work, but I don't know how seriously to take it. The amazing thing is that I found something so early that I can support myself doing, and that can even be extremely lucrative, but I love it either way.

* * *

It's interesting because you feel on the one hand, we understand people from what they say, and in another sense, you'd think that you'd be able to convey more through dialogue.

* * *

War is chaotic and when you start having a larger scale film and you have a lot of safety protocols and choreography, I would imagine it becomes more difficult.

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