Adrien Nicholas Brody is an American actor and producer. He was born on April 14, 1973. He received widespread recognition and acclaim after starring as Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s 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.
Taking acting classes as a child, by age thirteen, he appeared in an Off-Broadway play and a PBS television film. After appearing in Bullet in 1996 with Tupac Shakur and Mickey Rourke, Brody hovered on the brink of stardom, receiving an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his role in the 1998 film Restaurant.
In 2017, it was announced that he would join the cast of the fourth season of the BBC crime drama Peaky Blinders. On August 4, 2017, he received the Leopard Club Award at the Locarno Festival. The Leopard Club Award pays homage to a major film personality whose work has made a lasting impact on the collective imagination. Brody is the second male American actor after Christopher Lambert to receive the César Award for Best Actor.
Can Adrien Brody really play the piano?
Adrien Brody learned how to play the piano for his role in the pianist. Polanski also made Brody practise the piano for four hours a day, until he could master passages from some of Chopin’s finest works. Despite having very little energy, starving himself to experience the desperation that comes with hunger, Brody was determined to press on with his piano lessons.