LOS ANGELES — British actor Julian Sands, known for films such as “A Room With a View” and “Warlock,” was found dead after going missing five months ago in California’s San Gabriel Mountains. He was 65.
A body located Saturday on Mount Baldy has been identified as Sands, the San Bernardino coroner’s office confirmed Tuesday. The cause of death is pending further test results.
The search for Sands concluded Saturday more than five months after he was reported missing in the Mount Baldy area on Jan. 13. Hikers discovered Sands’ body Saturday morning and notified authorities, according to a Saturday press statement. The body was transported from the wilderness to the county coroner’s office for formal identification.
Sands was announced dead less than a week after the Sheriff’s Department resumed its search. In the search’s first months, storms blanketed Mount Baldy — considered one of the most dangerous mountains in the U.S. — with snow, hindering crew efforts.
Since launching its search in January, the Sheriff’s Department completed eight aerial and ground searches.
Sands was an avid mountaineer. In 2020, he told the Guardian he was happiest when “close to a mountain summit on a glorious cold morning.” He also noted a close brush with death in the early 1990s, when he and three other hikers were caught in “an atrocious storm above 20,000 ft” while trekking in the Andes Mountains.
“Mountain climbing and film making are very connected,” Sands told the Yorkshire Post in a 2013. “There’s always another mountain. And ultimately the point of climbing a mountain is that the mountain is within. And I think that’s true, too, of the acting experience.”
Sands’ career included roles in films and on television. After taking on minor parts in several movies in the early ’80s, the actor gained popularity with James Ivory’s romance film “A Room With a View” in 1985. He went on to appear in dozens of films and several series, including “24” and “Banshee.”
When his career began taking off, Sands told The Times in 1987, “there is such an element of luck in this business.”
Born Janaury 1958 in the United Kingdom, Sands attended Lord Wandsworth College and earned his first professional acting credit in an episode of “Play for Today” in 1982, according to online movie database IMDB. Roles in the film “Privates on Parade” and the Anthony Hopkins-led miniseries “A Married Man” followed.
In 1984, he starred alongside Rob Lowe in the low-budget “Oxford Blues,” a film Sands said he regrets and dubbed “the original ‘B’ movie.” In the same year, he married journalist Sarah Sands (née Harvey), with whom he shares son Henry. They divorced in 1987.
Sands wooed audiences in 1985’s “A Room With a View,” where he starred opposite Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott and Helena Bonham Carter. Set in the early 20th century, the period drama introduced Sands as a new Hollywood love interest.
Sands graced the screen as the free-spirited, lovestruck George Emerson. In its review, The Times noted that “Sands conveys George’s headlong passion for life with intelligence and a handsomeness that seems somehow to refract light with a special intensity.”
Among his memorable scenes was a romantic kiss with Bonham Carter’s Lucy in a picturesque poppy field in Italy.
The love extended off-screen, as Sands received fan letters about that moment and reveled in the film’s commercial and critical success.
“It seems to suggest that a lot of people have been yearning to see a little romance on the screen,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “In recent years filmmakers seem to have been embarrassed by romance and steered well clear of it. Maybe ‘A Room With a View’ will change that slightly.”
What the movie did change was Sands’ show-business standing. Demand increased. The actor booked the key role of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Ken Russell’s “Gothic.” He described working on the film as “being in the midst of a fireworks display.”
As the years went on, Sands appeared alongside even more Hollywood stars — Jodie Foster and Isabella Rossellini in “Siesta,” and Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Lauper in “Vibes.” He also moved from London to New York.
He starred in the titular role in Steve Miner‘s “Warlock.” The 1989 horror film allowed Sands to expand his talents beyond the small roles that defined his early career, and sink his teeth into darker material.
“I am the prince of malevolence,” he said in 1991. “(Warlock’s) so totally bad there is something attractive and pure about his evil. He is dedicated in his desire to create horror.”
In 1990, he remarried. He and journalist Evgenia Citkowitz share two daughters, Natalya and Imogen Sands.
The ’90s proved to be another fruitful decade for the actor, with roles in films including “Arachnophobia” and “Leaving Las Vegas.” Sands also tried his hand at more experimental, controversial roles.
A woman in a green jacket and jeans poses for pictures with a man in a white button-down shirt and black suit.
In David Cronenberg‘s 1991 film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ ”Naked Lunch,” Sands portrayed a young Swiss man who was really a giant shape-shifting centipede.
For Jennifer Lynch‘s critically panned “Boxing Helena,” Sands played a disturbed surgeon who takes extreme, unethical measures to earn a woman’s affection.
“I was looking for something exotic, things that took me out of myself,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “I think I found myself a little boring.”
When it came to television, Sands held roles in series including “24,” “The Blacklist,” “Banshee” and “Dexter.” His additional TV credits include “The L Word,” “Crossbones,” “Jackie Chan Adventures” and “Gotham.”
Reflecting on the minor roles that helped him break through (including a part in Roland Joffé’s Oscar-nominated “The Killing Fields”), Sands told The Times in 1987 that he wasn’t expecting much to come of them.
“The role was so tiny I’m surprised that people even remember me,” he said. “But they seem to, which is gratifying.”
(Los Angeles Times staff writers Christi Carras, Jonah Valdez and Matt Hamilton contributed to this report.)
