Lover of high altitude hikes, British actor Julian Sands, who has been missing since January, is now considered dead by Californian authorities, after the recent discovery of his body at Mount Baldy, near Los Angeles. He rose to prominence in the 1980s after playing a romantic hero in “Room with a View.”
The experienced hiker was reported missing in January as he set out to climb 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 Chambre avec vue (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 La Déchiure (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 Naked by David Cronenberg.
Since the 2000s, Julian Sands had also turned to the small screen, where he appeared in series like Smallville, Stargate SG-1, New York special team and 24 hours flat.
He had been close to death in the Andes
“I didn’t want to be a Hollywood actor,” he told 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, stranded 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 theatrical performances, 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.
