Adrien Brody on Sunday completed his return to the top of Hollywood's A list, winning the second best actor Oscar of his career for his searing portrayal of a Hungarian architect who emigrates to America after World War II in "The Brutalist."
Adrien Brody on Sunday completed his return to the top of Hollywood's A list, winning the second best actor Oscar of his career for his searing portrayal of a Hungarian architect who emigrates to America after World War II in "The Brutalist."
Both of Brody's Academy Awards have come for Holocaust-related films; he won in 2003 for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," becoming the youngest man ever to triumph in the category at age 29.
This time, he bested Timothee Chalamet in Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown," Ralph Fiennes in papal thriller "Conclave," Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump in "The Apprentice" and Colman Domingo as a wrongfully convicted inmate in "Sing Sing."
"Acting is a very fragile profession. It looks very glamorous and at certain moments, it is," an emotional Brody told the audience.
"No matter where you are in your career, no matter what you've accomplished, it can all go away. And I think what makes this night most special is the awareness of that and the gratitude that I have to still do the work that I love."
Winning the golden Oscar statuette caps an extraordinary awards season for the 51-year-old Brody, during which he captured nearly every major award for his work as Holocaust survivor Laszlo Toth, a Bauhaus-trained Jewish architect seeking a new life.
In "The Brutalist," Toth arrives alone in New York and relocates to Pennsylvania, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) lives. But that arrangement is short-lived, as Toth doesn't fit in with Attila's new life married to a Catholic woman.
As he tries to adjust to life in the United States, viewers see Toth struggling to learn English as he battles the demons of his past and the challenges of trying to work in an adopted homeland.
Everything changes when he meets industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Oscar nominee Guy Pearce), who commissions him to build a monolithic memorial to his mother -- but also insists on controlling his designs.
His family life also morphs with the arrival of his wife Erzsebet (Oscar nominee Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy).
"The Brutalist," which runs for three and a half hours, earned 10 Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and another for director Brady Corbet.
"If the past can teach us anything, it's a reminder to not let hate go unchecked," Brody said Sunday.
To put himself into Toth's shoes, Brody drew inspiration from his own family history.
Brody was born on April 14, 1973 to Sylvia Plachy, a photographer of Hungarian descent, and professor Elliot Brody, who is Jewish with Polish roots. Plachy moved from Budapest to New York in the 1950s.
"The character's journey is very reminiscent of my mother's and my ancestral journey of fleeing the horrors of war and coming to this great country," Brody said as he accepted a Golden Globe award in January.
"I owe so much to my mother, my grandparents for their sacrifice."
Brody started taking acting classes as a teenager, and attended both a special arts summer camp and a prestigious high school for the arts in New York.
After a series of small roles, his breakthrough came in Spike Lee's 1970s crime thriller "Summer of Sam" (1999).
Just a few years later, "The Pianist" hit cinemas -- Brody took hours of piano lessons to be able to do justice to the role of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a real-life Polish Jewish musician who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw during World War II.
His 2003 Oscar win was remembered for him planting a huge kiss on presenter Halle Berry that became controversial when she later admitted it took her by surprise.
Brody has said his work on "The Pianist" helped inform his portrayal of Toth two decades later.
After "The Pianist," Brody took on varied roles, from a youth with an intellectual disability in M. Night Shyamalan's horror flick "The Village" to writer Jack Driscoll in the 2005 remake of "King Kong," his biggest commercial success.
He played Salvador Dali in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," featured in Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "The French Dispatch," and even had a small role in the hit British television series "Peaky Blinders."
He walked the catwalk for Prada, embraced humanitarian causes and even starred in a music video for reggaeton singer Rauw Alejandro.
In his personal life, after a relationship with Spanish actress Elsa Pataky, Brody has been dating fashion designer Georgina Chapman -- the woman behind the Marchesa label and the ex-wife of disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein -- since 2020.
© Agence France-Presse
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