With his shrewd eyes and his forks of corn-yellow hair, Julian Sands was a natural choice to play the valiant, romantic George Emerson, who snatches a kiss from Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) in a Tuscan poppy field in A Room With a View (1985). “I wanted him to be real, not a two-dimensional minor screen god,” he said. “I liked him in his lighter, sexier moments, less so when he was brooding.”
Sands, who has died aged 65 while hiking in mountains in California, was dashing in that film, but he could also project a dandyish, effete or sinister quality. He was blessed with a mellifluous voice and a lean, youthful, fine-boned face, even if, as a child, his brothers insisted he resembled a horse. (He agreed.) In James Ivory’s film of EM Forster’s novel, he was pure heart-throb material. His participation in the notorious nude bathing scene was no impediment to the picture’s success.
Prior to that, he had played the journalist Jon Swain in The Killing Fields (1984), Roland Joffé’s drama about the bloody rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The picture marked the beginning of his friendship with his co-star John Malkovich. “I’d been cautioned by Roland to keep my distance from John because he was an unstable character,” Sands recalled. “And John had been told by Roland to stay away from me, because I was a refined, sensible person who didn’t want to be distracted. In fact, we bonded instantly.”
Malkovich directed Sands in a one-man show in which he read Harold Pinter’s poetry. First staged in 2011, the production had its origins in an occasion six years earlier when Pinter, suffering from oesophageal cancer, had asked Sands to read in his stead at a benefit event in St Stephen Walbrook church in the City of London. The writer “sat in the front row with his stone basilisk stare”, Sands recalled.
Not all his work was so highfalutin, and a good deal of it fell into the category of boisterous, campy fun. In Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), he played the poet Shelley, who indulges in sex, drugs and séances with Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) and the future Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson), and is prone to recite verse naked in thunderstorms.
In a similar vein but far less deranged was Impromptu (1991), which brought together other notable 19th-century figures including George Sand (Judy Davis) and Frederic Chopin (Hugh Grant). Sands, who played Franz Liszt, described it as “Carry On Composer”.
Born in Otley, West Yorkshire, he was raised in Leeds and Gargrave, near Skipton; he later described his childhood as “part conservative and part Huckleberry Finn”. His mother, Brenda, was a Tory councillor and leading light of the local amateur dramatic society, while his father, William, who left when Julian was three, was a soil analyst. Julian made his acting debut in a local pantomime at the age of eight.
At 13, he won a scholarship to Lord Wandsworth college, Hampshire. He moved to London to study at Central School of Speech and Drama, and while there became friends with Derek Jarman. He played the Devil in an extended promotional video that Jarman directed in 1979 for Marianne Faithfull’s album Broken English. The role had been intended for David Bowie, who dropped out at the eleventh hour. “You’re devilish,” Jarman told Sands. “You can play it.”
The actor’s first film appearance came in an adaptation of Peter Nichols’s stage comedy Privates on Parade (1983), starring John Cleese and Denis Quilley, from which his one line of dialogue was cut. There was more rotten luck when he won the lead in a new Tarzan movie, only for the financing to fall through. It was eventually filmed as Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), with Christopher Lambert donning the hallowed loin-cloth.
On television, he starred with Anthony Hopkins in the miniseries A Married Man (1983). In Oxford Blues (1984), he was a rower butting heads with a Las Vegas parking attendant (Rob Lowe) who has tricked his way into a place at Oriel College. He was in The Doctor and the Devils (1985), inspired by the Burke and Hare case. “I had a roll in the hay with Twiggy which took about 15 takes,” he said.
Following A Room With a View, he agreed to play the lead in Ivory’s next Forster adaptation, Maurice (1987), before abruptly dropping out and fleeing to the US. In the process, he left behind his wife, the journalist Sarah Sands (nee Harvey), who described him as “restless” and “dramatic”, and their son, Henry. “I’m not the first person to create stability and security and then dismantle it even more effectively than I created it,” the actor said.
Once in America he took on an array of film parts. In Warlock (1989), he played the son of Satan, wreaking havoc in modern-day Los Angeles. Investing this pantomime villain with lip-smacking brio, he was likened by the Washington Post to a “hell-bent Peter Pan” and nominated for best actor in the Fangoria Chainsaw awards. He reprised the role in Warlock: The Armageddon (1993).
As an entomologist in Arachnophobia (1990), he was called upon to have as many as a hundred spiders crawling all over his face. Alternating these mainstream projects with arthouse ones, he played a diplomat in pre-war Poland in Krzysztof Zanussi’s Wherever You Are … (1988) and a monk in Night Sun (1990), the Taviani brothers’ adaptation of Tolstoy’s short story Father Sergius.
For the Canadian horror director David Cronenberg, he starred in the warped and witty Naked Lunch (1991), which disproved those who had declared William S Burroughs’s original novel unfilmable. Just as outré but less accomplished was Boxing Helena (1993), directed by Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David. Sands played a surgeon who keeps a woman captive by making her a quadruple amputee.
After starring as a young classics teacher in his friend Mike Figgis’s film of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1994), Sands worked a further six times with that director, appearing in his movies even when he was an unorthodox choice for the job in hand. One example was the part of a menacing Latvian pimp in Leaving Las Vegas (1996).
Later roles include a mysteriously unblemished Phantom in Dario Argento’s version of The Phantom of the Opera (1998), Louis XIV (whom Sands described as “the first supermodel”) in Joffé’s Vatel (2000), a crime kingpin named Snakehead in the Jackie Chan vehicle The Medallion (2003), a computer security wizard in the comic caper Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), a younger version of the businessman played by Christopher Plummer in David Fincher’s take on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and a sadistic paedophile in the gruelling wartime odyssey The Painted Bird (2019).
On television, he was a Russian entrepreneur in the fifth season of 24 (2006) and the hero’s father, Jor-El, in two episodes of the Superman spin-off Smallville (2009). For the BBC, he played two very different actors in factually based one-off specials: first Laurence Olivier in Kenneth Tynan: In Praise of Hardcore (2005), then John Le Mesurier in We’re Doomed! The Dad’s Army Story (2015).
His recent work includes Benediction, Terence Davies’s haunting study of Siegfried Sassoon, and the thriller The Survivalist (both 2021), which found him back in the company of Malkovich. One of several titles still awaiting release is the drama Double Soul (2023) starring F Murray Abraham and Paz Vega.
Sands never stopped wandering, walking, running and climbing. “I am on a perpetual Grand Tour,” he said in 2000. Asked in 2018 about his eclectic career, he explained: “I was looking for something exotic, things that took me out of myself. I think I found myself a little boring.”
He was reported missing while out in the San Gabriel mountains, north of Los Angeles, in mid-January 2023. His remains were found in June.
In 1990 he married Evgenia Citkowitz. She survives him, along with their two daughters, Imogen and Natalya, and his son.
• Julian Richard Morley Sands, actor, born 4 January 1958; died circa 13 January 2023
