British actor Julian Sands, whose body was found and identified in California according to authorities on Tuesday, rose to prominence in the 1980s after playing a romantic hero. The experienced hiker was reported missing in January while climbing the highest peak in the San Gabriel Range near Los Angeles.
The actor, who died at the age of 65, was notably known for having played in “Room with a view” (1986), a film by director James Ivory, produced by Ismail Merchant, crowned by three Oscars and adapted from the novel by E.M. Forster, in which he seduced the main heroine, played by Helena Bonham Carter, under the Tuscan sun. Before that, he had already played a leading role, playing a British photographer in Roland Joffé’s film “The Tear” (1984).
He then shot in the register of horror and science fiction, notably in “Arachnophobia” (1990) and had turned into a mafia in “Leaving Las Vegas”, and had appeared in “Le Festin Nu” by David Cronenberg. Since the 2000s, Julian Sands had also turned to the small screen, where he appeared in series such as “Smallville”, “Stargate SG-1”, “New York special unit” and “24 Hours chrono”.
“I didn’t want to become a Hollywood actor,” he told the British daily The Guardian in 2018, “I was looking for something exotic, things that took me out of myself.” Passionate about mountains, he explained to the same newspaper in 2020 his happiness to be near a summit “a beautiful cold morning”. He said he was close to death “in the early 1990s, in the Andes, stuck in a terrible storm above 6,000 meters”. “We were all very bad. Some not far from us died, we were lucky.
Tall, blond, the comedian has often played villains: son of Satan in 1989 in the low-budget film “Warlock”, or on television in “24”. He has also won acclaim for his performances in the theatre, notably in a tribute to Harold Pinter directed by his friend John Malkovich, which was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011. The actor, who had taken up residence in California, was born in Yorkshire (northern England), where he grew up in a family of five children.
Julian Sands had studied drama at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, before joining the Forum Theater Company with which he performed many plays. He was married from 1984 to 1987 to British journalist Sarah Sands, with whom he had a son. And also had two daughters with writer Evgenia Citkowitz, whom he married in 1990.
