Adrien Brody

Adrien Brody was born on April 14 thirty years ago, in Brooklyn, the popular neighborhood of New York. His father Elliot was a history teacher and his mother Sylvia Plachy, of Hungarian origin, one of the most prestigious photographers in the American press, which helped him get used to being in front of the cameras. Since at the age of twelve he was already acting in front of his schoolmates, his mother advised him to enroll in the High School of Performing Arts in New York, where the famous series Fame was filmed . While studying, he made his professional debut in Home at Last , a 1988 television spin-off. The appearance of filmmaker Steven Soderbergh , who hired him for King of the Hill , was decisive in his life., which leads to him being offered the most varied roles, although usually in mediocre films, such as Solo. The destroyer , Bullet , The last time I committed suicide or Restaurant . This long journey produced its fruits when he was noticed by the cult director Terrence Malick , who offered him a role on a silver platter that was going to mean international recognition for him, Captain Fife, a compulsive smoker from The Thin Red Line ., which in principle was one of the most prominent. The actor’s surprise must have been enormous when he went to the first screening, because the director had forgotten to tell him the small detail that at the last moment, he had decided to reduce his interpretation to one sentence: most of his scenes fell on the table mounting.

At least Malick had the courtesy to recommend him to director Spike Lee , who was looking for the right actor to play the punk suspected of being a serial killer in Nobody’s Safe from Sam . In Liberty Hights he put himself under the orders of Barry Levinson , in another of the intimate films that the director of Rain Man likes to shoot from time to time . He did not have much luck in his collaboration with the British Ken Loach : Bread and roses will not go down in history as the best of the author of Hidden Agenda, but Brody muddled through, like an unconventional union organizer. But the most meaningful work of his at this stage is his portrayal of a prominent Bosnian war photographer in Elie Chouraqui ‘s The Flowers of Harrison . The secret that the actor was so convincing is that he knew all the details of his character’s occupation, because it is his mother’s real job. To demonstrate his versatility, in his next film, Charles Shyer ‘s Mystery of the Necklace , he played Nicolas de la Motte, a revolutionary in 18th-century France.

The latter was shot in Paris, the city where he ran into director Roman Polanski , who at the time was whining to the rooftops that he was having difficulty finding someone capable of embodying a real character, the Polish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman , whose memoirs were going to bring to the screen in The Pianist. Although the filmmaker had placed an ad in the newspaper to which 1,400 actors responded, he decided that Brody was the closest to his idea of ​​the character, but made him slim down to look even more like himself. In addition to fifteen kilos, Brody also lost his girlfriend, who he had been with for eight months, and who could not bear the tension and irritability caused by an intense shoot in Europe, in which he had to make efforts such as familiarizing himself with the piano, which was helped by knowing how to play the synthesizer, and by learning to speak with a Polish accent, which at least was familiar to him, thanks to his grandmother. All this is reflected on the screen, in the opinion of the members of the Hollywood Academy, who decided to make him the only actor in history who has snatched the Oscar from four others who had previously won it.Richard Dreyfuss the title of youngest adult actor to have taken the statuette.

It can’t be easy finding another character to match, and for this reason, Brody is thinking carefully about his next jobs. For now, we will see him as the bad guy in an action movie, The Singing Detective , with Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr.