JULIAN SANDS
(4 January 1958 - January 2023)
The life of the English actor Julian Sands ended in a very sad way. On 13 January, 2023, he disappeared while hiking on Mount Baldy in the San Gabriel Mountains on the borders of Los Angeles and the San Bernardino counties of California. Sands was an experienced and dedicated runner and mountaineer, but at the time of his disappearance there were heavy storms and avalanches which may have impeded his climb, leading to his death. His car was discovered on 18 January but, despite thorough air and ground searches taken by several hundred rescue members and volunteers, the remains of his body were not located until 24 June and were later identified as being those of Sands.
Julian Richard Morley Sands was born in Otley in Yorkshire to William and Brenda Sands. He trained to be an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London where he met his first wife, the journalist Sarah Harvey. After some stage work, he started his film and television career in small roles from 1982. He was a sailor in Privates on Parade, appeared in Oxford Blues with Rob Lowe and was in Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields (1984) as the journalist Jon Swain. With his long face and matinee idol good looks, he was a natural choice for the part of George Emerson in James Ivory’s A Room With a View (1985), the unconventional role of a slightly caddish man seeking any opportunity that comes his way.
Unconventional could describe Julian Sands’ career in general. Ken Russell cast him as the poet Shelley in Gothic, a biopic about Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson) and her writing of Frankenstein in an atmosphere of game playing, ghost stories, madness and sexual fantasy chez Lord Byron, played by Gabriel Byrne. Sands had the title role in Steve Miner’s Warlock (1989) where he has to escape death by magically disappearing into the future, followed by witch hunter Richard E. Grant.
In Arachnophobia (1990) he played an entomologist who inadvertently unleashed a deadly spider on a small Californian town. There were more bugs in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, based on William S. Burroughs’ biography and his drug use, a fantasy in which a writer’s typewriter becomes a cockroach, with Julian Sands playing a centipede disguised as a Swiss homosexual.
Even more unlikely was Sands as the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt in James Lapine’s Impromptu, with George Sand (Judy Davis) in pursuit of Frederic Chopin (Hugh Grant). Impromptu? More like Impossible... Sands was also in Rusty Lemorande's version of The Turn of the Screw (1992), the Anglo-Japanese Tale of a Vampire and a sequel to Warlock called Warlock: The Armageddon. In Boxing Helena, he was a surgeon who is obsessed with a former lover, so amputates her limbs and turns her into a package. He was Yuri in Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas, played the Phantom in Dario Argento’s version of The Phantom of the Opera (1998), and was Louis XIV in Vatel, another film for Roland Joffé. Julian Sands never seemed to be short of parts and from 2000 was in a variety of films and television series, notching up over 150 appearances throughout his career – and there are still three more films to come.
Julian Sands was married to Sarah Harvey from 1984 to 1987 and they have a son. In 1990 he married the playwright and journalist Evgenia Citkowitz and they have two daughters. We will never know what Julian Sands would have made of the rest of his career, so abruptly shortened by his unexplained disappearance in the San Gabriel Mountains. An unconventional end to an unconventional life.
MICHAEL DARVELL