Adrien Brody won a Golden Globe as Best Actor in a drama for The Brutalist, the movie also won a Globe as did the director Brady Corbet. Subsequently he was nominated to an Academy Award. He had won an Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski from a memoir by Polish-Jewish pianist, composer and Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman.
As an entertainment journalist I interviewed Adrien Brody several times, and I wrote articles for international publications.
I selected quotes of what he said about India from a 2007 exclusive interview with the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press about The Darjeeling Limited by Wes Anderson, for my weekly column Out of the Archives on the Golden Globes website.
In The Brutalist Adrien Brody plays a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect who immigrates from Budapest to New York after World War II. The actor said that this story has direct parallels to his family’s history, so he understands that journey, which is universal, because many people are descendants of immigrant families fleeing the horrors of war. His mother, Sylvia Plachy, and her parents, her Jewish mother and her Catholic father, fled Budapest in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution and emigrated to the United States. His mother is an artist, a photographer.
During his acceptance speech at the Globes, Brody said: “I owe so much to my mother and my grandparents for their sacrifice, and although I do not know how to fully express all of the challenges that you and many people have faced and experienced in your struggle to immigrate to this country, I hope that this work stands to give you a voice. And I often credit my mother for her influence on me as an artist, but dad you are the foundation of this family and all this love that I received flows back to you.” Brody’s father Elliot is of Polish Jewish descent.
Then the actor addressed the director Mona Fastvold, Brady’s wife and writing and creative partner, “Thank you for giving me wings, for allowing me to be a small part of building this triumph and monument to humanity and the arts.”
In Production Notes distributed to press Brody stated: “The Brutalist is the journey of a refugee connected to his past who has been stripped of his past, and he’s trying to find his way in a new land with a new set of rules. It’s a story of quiet perseverance and the need to strive for excellence, even when the ground has been ripped out from underneath you. The months spent researching and connecting with Szpilman‘s past for The Pianist, and the horrors of that era, still haunt me and offered an emotional understanding to the harrowing experiences and loss that inform László’s journey coming to America as a refugee.”
On February 13 Adrien Brody and his costar Guy Pearce were honored with the Cinema Vanguard Award at the 40th Santa Barbara Film festival. During the Q&A he said: “I gained an understanding of the hardships many people endure, that sense of loss and suffering that is pervasive in this world.”
P.S. Adrien Brody did win the Oscar as Best Actor for The Brutalist. He said at the end of this acceptance speech: “I’m here once again to represent the lingering traumas and the repercussions of war, of systematic oppression, of anti-Semitism and racism, of othering. I pray for a healthier, happier and more inclusive world. I believe that, if the past can teach us anything, it’s a reminder to not let hate go unchecked. Let’s fight for what’s right. Keep smiling, keep loving one another. And let’s rebuild together.”