The Hollywood Reporter
Human remains recently discovered by hikers in the Mount Baldy wilderness outside Los Angeles were identified as those of British actor Julian Sands, who had been missing since January, authorities announced Tuesday.
On Saturday morning, civilian hikers contacted the Fontana Sheriff’s Station after they found the remains, which were then taken to the San Bernardino County Coroner for identification.
“The identification process for the body located on Mt. Baldy on June 24, 2023, has been completed and was positively identified as 65-year-old Julian Sands of North Hollywood,” the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. “The manner of death is still under investigation, pending further test results. We would like to extend our gratitude to all the volunteers that worked tirelessly to locate Mr. Sands.”
An avid outdoorsman, Sands was reported missing by his family Jan. 13 after he had gone hiking in the Baldy Bowl Trail area of the San Gabriel Mountains that day. The sheriff’s department and volunteers have been searching the area since then, with the effects of an unusually severe winter hampering their efforts.
“The local mountains offer great adventure, you can go out for an hour, a day or even several days,” Sands had said in a May 2020 interview for the Thrive Global website. “It’s always different and always fantastic. And of course, I do believe in a certain athleticism for me as an actor, keeping fit is important. So living, or being based in Los Angeles — actors don’t really live anywhere, they are always on the road — lends itself to a wonderful outdoors lifestyle.”
In two of his most memorable roles, Sands wooed Helena Bonham Carter’s character in the acclaimed Merchant-Ivory drama A Room With a View (1985) and starred as a son of Satan in a pair of Warlock movies.
The lanky actor also was memorable as a Latvian pimp in the Nicolas Cage-starring Leaving Las Vegas (1995), one of seven films he made for writer, director and countryman Mike Figgis. The others were The Browning Version (1994), One Night Stand (1997), The Loss of Sexual Innocence (1999), the innovative Timecode (2000), Hotel (2001) and Suspension of Disbelief (2012).
He was not afraid to take risks: He played a shapeshifting centipede posing as a Swiss gentleman in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991) and the surgeon who quadruple-amputates his obsession (Sherilyn Fenn) in Jennifer Lynch’s controversial Boxing Helena (1993).
Sands made an early impression with moviegoers as British photographer Jon Swain in the Roland Joffé-directed The Killing Fields (1984), about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The film also starred Sam Waterston, Haing S. Ngor and John Malkovich.
“Roland’s audition process was extraordinary,” he told The Guardian in a 2014 interview. “I was 24, and I’ve never come across anything as rigorous since. He was looking to put together a troupe of actors without much film experience, because he wanted the freshness of everything to resonate with us.”
The Killing Fields was nominated for the Oscar for best picture, and a year later, so was A Room With a View. In the romantic period piece, Sands was at his dashing best as the free-spirited George Emerson, who ultimately wins the love of Bonham Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch over the bookish Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis ) in the year 1907.
“The power of the film was in what the camera saw as much as what the characters said to one another,” he said at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival. “Some of the most beautiful moments were moments that didn’t require speech, because what was there to say? The scene in the cornfield when we embrace, certain scenes around the piazza … they are iconic.”
Julian Sands and Helena Bonham Carter in 1985’s A Room With a View. Courtesy Everett Collection
Sands’ title character created mayhem in 20th century Los Angeles after being transported from Boston in 1861 in Warlock (1989), and he returned for Warlock: The Armageddon (1993). Bruce Payne portrayed the menacing villain in the 1999 sequel.
The third of five sons, Julian Richard Morley Sands was born on Jan. 4, 1958, in West Yorkshire, England. He attended Lord Wandsworth College and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and appeared in Derek Jarman’s 1979 short film, Broken English, starring Marianne Faithfull. (He also served as assistant director on that).
In 1983, Sands showed up on the London Weekend Television miniseries A Married Man, starring Anthony Hopkins, and had a supporting role in Oxford Blues the following year, which saw him break out in The Killing Fields.
George was Roger Ebert’s favorite character in A Room With a View, he wrote in his review, and he admired Sands’ delivery of an “astonishing” speech to Lucy “in which he explains that Love exists between them. (Not love, but Love — you can hear the capital letter in his voice.)
“Lucy must not marry Cecil, he explains, because Cecil does not understand women and will never understand Lucy and wants her only for an ornament. George, on the other hand, wants her as his partner in the great adventure of life.”
Sands also played the British poet Shelley in Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt in James Lapine’s Impromptu (1991), the masked man in a 1998 version of The Phantom of the Opera and an Israeli dance teacher in Yeh Ballet (2020).
His onscreen résumé also included the films Arachnophobia (1990), The Medallion (2003), Golf in the Kingdom (2010), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and The Painted Bird (2019) and TV stints on Smallville (as Jor-El), 24, The L Word, Person of Interest, Gotham, Elementary and The Blacklist.
In 2013, he starred on stages from Edinburgh to San Francisco in A Celebration of Harold Pinter, directed by Malkovich.
Survivors include his second wife, writer Evgenia Citkowitz, whom he married in 1990, and his three children, Henry, Natalya and Imogen.
A day before his remains were discovered, his family released their first statement since the search began, expressing their gratitude to those “who have worked tirelessly” to find him.
“We continue to hold Julian in our hearts with bright memories of him as a wonderful father, husband, explorer, lover of the natural world and the arts and as an original and collaborative performer.”
In his Thrive Global interview, Sands described the feeling he got from hiking.
“It’s about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains,” he said. “It’s not so much a celebration of oneself but the eradication of one’s self-consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony hopefully with your environment.”
Source: Hollywood Reporter
