A body that was discovered in wilderness near Mount Baldy in California on Saturday was confirmed last night to be that of the missing British actor Julian Sands.
It had been transported to the coroner’s office for identification, and the San Bernardino sheriff’s department said in a statement yesterday: “The identification process for the body … has been completed and was positively identified as 65-year-old Julian Sands.
San Bernardino county sheriff’s department had been co-ordinating a search for the actor, who was reported missing in San Gabriel mountains on 13 January. Bad weather hampered rescuers as they tried to find Sands, preventing ground searches for long periods. Last week, the sheriff’s office said they were scaling back the search after a renewed effort involving more than 80 people on 17 June proved unsuccessful.
A few days later, Sands’s family issued their first statement in four months, saying they were “deeply grateful” to the search teams and that they continued to hold the actor “in our hearts “with bright memories of him as a wonderful father, husband, explorer, lover of the natural world and the arts, and as an original and collaborative performer.”
John Malkovich, a friend of Sands for 40 years after meeting on the set of The Killing Fields in 1983, paid tribute to him as Seneca – On the Creation of Earthquakes, the film they made together, premiered at the Berlin film festival in February. Malkovich said: “I love Jules. He was someone who was very, very clever … It’s a great loss.” He added: “He was such a terrific storyteller … and so, so funny. Since the day we met, I could talk to him about anything, and he could talk to me about anything.”
Born in 1958, Sands acquired a reputation as a fearless and eccentric actor, as much in love with outdoor life as performing. “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.”
after newsletter promotion
Sands might have made his name by playing Lord Greystoke – AKA Tarzan – in the 1980s after being a leading contender for the central role, but eventually Christopher Lambert was cast. Instead, Sands made his breakthrough playing the journalist Jon Swain in Oscar-winning epic The Killing Fields in 1984 and with an uninhibited performance as George Emerson, Helena Bonham Carter’s love interest in the 1986 EM Forster adaptation A Room With a View. He subsequently consolidated his out-there reputation with the role of Percy Shelley in Ken Russell’s crazed literary horror Gothic.
Sands then moved to Los Angeles, but by his own admission “didn’t want to be a Hollywood actor”. His choice of roles was by any standards unconventional: he starred in the satanic horror Warlock, played shape-shifting alien Yves Cloquet in David Cronenberg’s phantasmagoric Naked Lunch and a limb-amputating surgeon in Jennifer Lynch’s controversial Boxing Helena.
More conventional films followed: he played the spider-expert scientist in hit thriller Arachnophobia, and an association with British director Mike Figgis led to roles in The Browning Version (as a teacher) and Leaving Las Vegas (somewhat improbably as a violent east European pimp). However, Sands clearly preferred to work outside the mainstream, joining Figgis in more experimental fare (The Loss of Sexual Innocence, Timecode) and playing the title role in Dario Argento’s 1998 horror film Phantom of the Opera.
His subsequent career saw him take an amazingly eclectic path: from small roles in Ocean’s Thirteen and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to gruesome Czech war epic The Painted Bird and his most recent credited role in Siegfried Sassoon biopic Benediction.
Sands’ love of mountain climbing and hiking was well known, telling the Guardian he was happiest when he was “close to a mountain summit on a glorious cold morning”. He was married twice: to journalist Sarah Sands between 1984-87, and in 1990 to journalist Evgenia Citkowitz.
