Julian Sands Had Movie Star Looks, But The Body of Work He Leaves Behind Defiantly Resists The Classification Of Stardom

British Romanticism, as a literary movement, was brief but burned bright: bookended by two humanist developments in the French Revolution (1789) and the Reform Act of 1832, it has six pillars which comprise its foundation — William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon (6th) Lord Byron and John Keats — and great thinkers and creators of surpassing gifts to serve as its walls and buttresses. Romanticism is the headwaters for Freud’s construction of the human subconscious, the nursing ground for the social dissections of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, the mad and drug-fueled essays of Thomas De Quincey, the utilitarian philosophies of William Godwin. Romanticism is steeped in the concept of “hiraeth,” that is of a memory and unquenchable longing for things that have never been experienced, places never visited, people never met. It is exultant, nostalgic, in love with loss, and it takes nature as the first testament of God in the lives of Man. 

They took a lot of drugs, the Romanticists — laudanum, mostly (a draught of opium dissolved in alcohol) — and they walked. Oh how they walked, everywhere, in all weathers at all times. Their diaries and letters are full of mentions of daily constitutionals through the Lake District and the Scottish Highland, seeking inspiration there and finding it in the movement of clouds, in lime tree bowers and crowds of daffodils. One of Shelley’s best-known poems is an ode to Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps, a range of mountains the Romanticists saw as a geographical manifestation of the sublime:

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears – still, snowy, and serene;

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

PIle around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps.

When Julian Sands went missing during a hike on Mt. Baldy in the San Gabriel mountains in January, my first thought was of this poem and of how intimately Sands was equated in my mind with the Romanticists, this group of dreamers, philosophers, artists who tied their immortality to nature. He never seemed entirely of this world because he so often, so defiantly, resisted expectation. He followed his own path. He played Shelley (of course) in Ken Russell’s hallucinogenic horror film Gothic (1986) opposite Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley and Gabriel Byrne as a demonic Lord Byron. It’s a fanciful telling of the fateful retreat, one that gives too much credit to Percy for Mary’s accomplishments, in which a storytelling game designed to pass the time resulted in, among other things, the first draft of Frankenstein. In the middle of a torrential downpour, Sands’ Shelley, stark naked, climbs a gabled rooftop to shout at the lightning and the raging elements.

He finds himself in another cloudburst in his breakthrough film, A Room with a View (1985), as moony heartthrob George Emerson. His character falls in love in Italy with a vacationing Lucy Honeychurch (Helene Bonham-Carter). In one of the most exhilaratingly romantic moments in the modern arthouse, George sweeps her up in his arms in a field of wild grass as Pucchini’s “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta,” comes to crescendo on the soundtrack. In the aria, as George and Lucy fall in an embrace, the legendary Kiwi soprano Kiri Te Kanawa sings, in Italian, “crazy love/crazy intoxication.” As the scene opens, George is facing away, contemplative in the classic Romanticist pose, looking at a wall of green and fanning himself with his hat as Lucy approaches from behind.

When he turns, surprised, he strides uphill to meet her with magnetic, hypnotic, hot purpose. It’s breathtaking.

George returns to town after Lucy is spirited away by her shocked keeper, and thunder rolls across the countryside to mark his passage. He pats his chest, inviting the rain, splashing through puddles in the mud track, walking for miles as day turns to night to ring Lucy’s bell, soaked to the bone but enflamed by the first bloom of passion.

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps.

Mont Blanc appears – still, snowy, and serene;

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps.

That he would follow something so traditional and conventionally entertaining as A Room with a View with bad boy Ken Russell’s Gothic and then Mary Lambert’s nightmarish Siesta (1987) — a precursor to David Fincher’s The Game (1997) and Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and my favorite of Sands’ films with several notable pretenders to that crown — was baffling to me as a kid. Here is Sands, beautiful, feted and British, the prototypical leading man in a career destined for prestige and mainstream awards recognition choosing instead to appear in personal projects eschewing narrative and trafficking in provocation, carnality, sex and gore. It doesn’t make sense unless you begin to see Sands as a Romanticist, an artist seeking sublimity in the evidence of the natural world — in the impulses of human beings in communion with their bestial self, beholding every revelation of the flesh, even the perverse and violent, as miraculous.

William Blake, the “father” and mad monk of Romanticism, struggled with the tension between writing about running naked through the world and just doing it. He etched his words and drawings on metal plates with acid and touched each of the first prints of his collections “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience.” He believed the touch of the creator imbued his creations with the artist’s creative soul: animated them as blood and other bodily humors animates animals. I think A Room with a View unlocked Sands’ philosophy of the sublime, not as an artistic rudder but an existential blueprint. George Emerson’s love of overgrown gardens at the edges of civilization, thunderstorms and sudden gales and long kisses in the wild open as opera plays in your imagination — that was what Sands loved, too. Life could be bliss if only you had the courage to brave the world savage and splendid. You can see feel the touch of his sublimity in Gothic, Siesta, in his brief but film-stealing moments as a hungry, predatory denizen of Interzone in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1995); and a pathetic, possibly mad Russian pimp in Mike Figgis’ emotionally and sexually lacerating Leaving Las Vegas (1995).

He brought unpredictability to each of his roles. He speaks more slowly than you might expect him to, he has a dancer’s grace, but lumbers and stutters at moments you think he’d swoop and glide. He leans in when he talks and disarms as he does so. As mother-drunk surgeon Nick Cavanaugh in Jennifer Lynch’s (daughter of David) controversial Boxing Helena (1993), Sands is aquiline perfection, tall and elegant but infantilized by his obsessive love for cruel, unobtainable Helena (Sherilyn Fenn). After a terrible accident that is mostly his fault, he devises a plan to keep Helena for himself, imprisoned in his mansion in the hills, just the two of them trapped with the memory of his castrating mother. Sands’ Nick is a remarkable portrait of arrested masculinity, perched in a tree outside Helena’s window to catch of glimpse of his inamorata only to be wounded by her dalliances with other men. He’s like a child, a dangerous, scheming and predatory one, and in another time Sands would be the ideal hero, unstable if outwardly firm, of any number of John Fowles novels and adaptations. When he invites Helena to a party he’s throwing just to get her within his gaze, he plays the aria “O mio babbino caro,” another Pucchini piece recently made famous as the theme song for A Room with a View. Unable to escape George Emerson, many of his roles subsequent seem to be lampoons of the kind of romantic heartthrob he refused to be. 

He is never “safe” on screen. Wherever he shows up, I brace myself. Even as a young war journalist in Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields (1984), Sands betrays with his eyes the terrible wisdom he’s gained from the atrocities he’s witnessed, and the terrible burden of the storm he knows is coming. He’s especially dangerous as George Emerson who as one analogue for author E.M. Forster (the spinster Charlotte, played by Dame Maggie Smith in the film, is the other), challenges the vicious rigidity of the English class system in his pursuit of a young woman pining for a more essential, a more natural state.

In Wim Wenders’ overlooked and underestimated Million Dollar Hotel (2000), Sands appears as a mephistophelean art dealer who provides a fascinating analysis of a collection of work by a dead painter: “It’s garbage… important garbage. Social, psychotic, erotic, elegant, no, dark. Very dark, yet optimistic. Large, dark, garbage is art I like.” Tongue in cheek, I think there’s transparency bleeding through here to the spirit that moved Sands. He came alive in the places and things others had castoff or judged worthless and embarrassing. He didn’t care what you thought, that you found him impolite or ill-considered in his choices. Watch the way he dances in a village square to a woman singing a mournful flamenco in Siesta. While his girlfriend (Jodie Foster) cuts a neat rug, his expat artist/anarchist Kit jerks and twitches like he’s holding the end of a live wire. 

That was Julian Sands, always moving crosswise across what was permitted, always in tension with what convention expected of him. When I learned after a long and stormy winter that human remains had been found in the area he’d been traversing, and then finally on June 26, 2023 that the remains had been identified as his, I watched a dozen of his films again, one after the other, but I kept returning to Percy Shelley and the Romanticists in between. Shelley, like Keats and Byron before him, died before his time —  swept away by shipwreck off the coast of A Room with a View’s Italy, his body discovered ten days after the capsizing of an open, mast-heavy boat he called “Don Juan.” He was cremated on the shore but his heart, which had calcified some think from a bout with tuberculosis he had survived, wouldn’t burn. It found its way back from Livorno to his Mary in England who interred it in Dorset. Even in death, his heart returned to his beloved.

When I think of Sands, I think, too, of the best known paintings from the British Romanticist era is by Caspar David Friedrich for which he could have been the model. It’s called “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (see above) and it captures something of the spirit of the Romanticists: the artist as seeker facing away into an unknowable future in the embrace of, indeed shrouded by, nature and gladly at its mercy. Julian Sands had planned to walk a trail called “Baldy Bowl” — a glacial bowl, a “fluvial cirque” that looks very much like the vista in Friedrich’s painting that the solitary, windswept traveler crests. I like to think of Sands, inveterate mountaineer, frozen there for all of time at the precipice of his next step into the greater unknown. Shelley’s best known for his poem “Ozymandias” which warns of building monuments to the self that will only surrender to the forgetfulness of time, but my favorite of his work is a short piece called “The flower that smiles to-day”:

The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.

Virtue, how frail it is!
Friendship how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!
But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call.

Whilst skies are blue and bright,
Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep.

I like to think this is how Julian Sands might like to be remembered — as lightning that “mocks the night / Brief even as bright.” Defiant, unclassifiable, ever in the moment however mercurial, incongruous, or inexplicable. His life and career are a monument to the glory of what is impermissible and the freedom that comes with an earnest troubling of the water. In the pursuit of truths so immediate and plain that they are as inexpressible as they are universal; as discomfiting as they are familiar; as infinite as they are fleeting. Make glad the day that is ineffable and sublime. As the composer Franz Liszt in James Lapine’s Impromptu (1991) Sands says “Artists are the only hope… we are a search party of orphans with our emotions the lantern in the dark.” Julian Sands was 65. He left behind a rare legacy of unusual landscapes to be explored. Let us go then, you and I.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.