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It was March 23, 2003, when Adrien Brody, before his 30th Based on such information alone, one could think that
birthday, became the youngest actor ever to win the Academy Brody’s career – between Oscar awards or even before – is made of
Award for Best Actor. The movie he starred in was The Pianist, a serious roles and rigorous art films. It is not exactly true. Brody’s is
masterpiece based on the autobiography of Władysław Szpilman a personal, irregular and fascinating career, just like his face.
(but also, in part, an autobiography of the director Roman He was born into a family where art was daily bread – his father
Polanski). The film retraces the horror of World War II, nazism, was a retired history professor and especially a painter, and his
and the persecution of Jews through the story of an imprisoned mother was a photographer. He began to study drama and perform
Jewish pianist fighting for survival in the Warsaw ghetto. in off-Broadway shows while he was but an adolescent. His film
Cut. debut came in 1989, when he was selected for a small role in an
Twenty-two years later, on March 3, 2024, Adrien Brody episode of New York Stories, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Yet,
stepped onto the stage of the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles to collect it took a dozen of years before the world of cinephiles noticed him:
the same award for the second time. Once again, his performance at first, in a role – truth be told, massacred by Terrence Malick’s
is related to the atrocity of the Holocaust. In The Brutalist, the editing – in The Thin Red Line, then when Spike Lee chose him to
actor interprets László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, be a serial killer known as The Son of Sam in Summer of Sam and
upon surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp, emigrates to Ken Loach as the protagonist of Bread and Roses.
the United States where, after numerous struggles, he works for In the blink of an eye came the Oscar for The Pianist. But it was
an American billionaire to make a building in which he expresses afterward that Brody started taking peculiar and controversial, at
all of his trauma. times counterintuitive, directions: from a mentally ill character

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