Adrien Brody (born April 14, 1973, Queens, New York, U.S.) is an American actor who won the Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of Władysław Szpilman, the title character of Roman Polanski’s Holocaust film The Pianist (2002).
Brody took acting classes as a child, and he performed in experimental and Off-Broadway plays before he reached high school. He attended the Fiorello H. Laguardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and played an orphan in the 1988 television movie Home at Last, about the orphan train program. Brody made his big-screen debut in a small part in the anthology movie New York Stories (1989). He briefly attended both Stony Brook University and Queens College before moving to Los Angeles. Brody appeared in the independent film The Boy Who Cried Bitch (1991) and in Steven Soderbergh’s King of the Hill (1993). He took the part of a baseball player in Angels in the Outfield (1994) and starred in the unsuccessful drama Ten Benny (1995). He was cast in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), but his part largely disappeared in editing. Brody won notice for his performance as an aspiring punk rocker in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (1999), and he appeared in Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights (1999) and Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses (2000).
In The Pianist, based on the real-life memoir of Szpilman, Brody gave a quiet dignity to the character, an accomplished musician who initially appears nonplussed at Nazi encroachment but soon realizes the horrors of the Holocaust. His performance netted him the César Award for best actor in addition to the Oscar. Brody’s later roles included the village idiot in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), a playwright in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), Leonard Chess in Cadillac Records (2008), and Salvador Dalí in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011). Among his subsequent films were the World War II drama Da hong zha (2018; Air Strike) and Clean (2020); he cowrote the latter, which centers on a garbage man with a violent past. During this time Brody also appeared in a number of Wes Anderson’s films, including The Darjeeling Limited (2007), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and The French Dispatch (2021). In addition, he voiced the Field Mouse in Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).
Brody occasionally appeared on television. He starred as the title character in the miniseries Houdini (2014), and for his performance he earned an Emmy Award nomination. In 2017 Brody had a recurring role on the series Peaky Blinders. He later starred in Chapelwaite (2021), a miniseries based on Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” about a sea captain in the 1850s who returns to his family home and discovers that it may be haunted. Also in 2021 Brody earned praise—and later an Emmy nomination—for his portrayal of a billionaire investor in the TV series Succession. In the limited series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022), Brody was cast as Pat Riley, coach of the Los Angeles Lakers of the NBA.