Actor Julian Sands forged eclectic career

LONDON

Julian Sands, whose body was identified on June 27 after he disappeared in January while hiking in California, was a British actor who shot to fame as the romantic hero in 1980s period drama "A Room with a View."

The 65-year-old vanished on the 3,000-meter Mount San Antonio, known locally as Mount Baldy. Last weekend hikers there found human remains, with police confirming on June 27 they belonged to Sands.

The 65-year-old's break-out role was plain-speaking George Emerson in the Oscar-winning 1985 adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel.

In the hit film from producer-and-director duo Merchant Ivory (Ismail Merchant and James Ivory), he seduced the prim heroine, played by Helena Bonham Carter, in sun-drenched Tuscany. He also stripped off for a memorable skinny-dipping scene.

Sands had already appeared as a British photographer in Roland Joffe's 1984 Oscar-winning drama set in Cambodia, "The Killing Fields."

In a varied subsequent career, Sands appeared in films as diverse as Frank Marshall's 1990 spider-themed horror romp "Arachnophobia", David Cronenberg's controversial "Naked Lunch" and alcohol-soaked 1995 drama "Leaving Las Vegas," directed by Mike Figgis and starring Nicolas Cage.

Sands told The Guardian broadsheet in 2018 of his career choices: "I didn't want to become a Hollywood actor" and "I was looking for something exotic, things that took me out of myself."

He was equally passionate about mountain climbing, telling The Guardian that he is happiest "close to a mountain summit on a glorious cold morning."

The closest he had come to death was "in the early 90s, in the Andes, caught in an atrocious storm above 20,000ft with three others," Sands told the Guardian in 2020.

"We were all in a very bad way. Some guys close to us perished; we were lucky."

With angular good looks, Sands often veered towards darker roles.

He starred as a son of Satan in 1989 low-budget horror film "Warlock" - alongside Richard E. Grant as a witch-hunter - while his television roles included an appearance as a villain in U.S. action series "24."

He also made critically acclaimed theater appearances, including playing former British prime minister Tony Blair in David Hare's play "Stuff Happens" at London's National Theatre.

He also starred in a one-man show celebrating British playwright Harold Pinter, directed by his friend John Malkovich and first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011.

Sands told The Washington Post in 2015 that Pinter "was seminal in my desire to want to be an actor, even as a high school student in the 1970s."

The actor grew up in Yorkshire in northern England. His mother was a secretary and his father did agricultural soil surveys.

He studied at the renowned Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

After the success of "A Room with a View", he moved to Los Angeles.

He married writer Evgenia Citkowitz in 1990. He leaves behind three children including a son with his previous wife, British journalist Sarah Sands.