Julian Sands, a flexible British actor whose movie roles included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Louis XIV, a warlock, Superman’s father and a Latvian pimp, was pronounced lifeless on Tuesday, greater than 5 months after disappearing whereas climbing alone on a path on Mount Baldy within the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California. He was 65.
On Sunday, authorities recovered human stays close to the mountain the place search crews had been on the lookout for Mr. Sands. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Division stated it had been contacted by hikers who had discovered human stays within the Mount Baldy wilderness. Harmful situations, together with a sequence of extreme storms, had difficult search efforts.
The coroner’s workplace recognized the stays as Mr. Sands on Tuesday. It added that the reason for his loss of life remained below investigation.
Along with his shock of blond hair and his sometimes icy demeanor, Mr. Sands was immediately recognizable. He may slip simply from a fancy dress drama like James Ivory’s “A Room With a View” (1985), wherein he performed an idealistic romantic across the flip of the Twentieth century, to an occult film like “Warlock” (1989), wherein, because the title character, he flees a Seventeenth-century witch hunter to Twentieth-century Los Angeles.
“He was all the time good, all the time gallant and dignified,” Janet Maslin, a former New York Instances movie critic, stated in a cellphone interview. “I don’t bear in mind a false transfer from him.”
Mr. Sands performed Shelley in Ken Russell’s horror movie “Gothic” (1987), which recreates a real story: a gathering on a stormy evening in 1816 in a Swiss villa the place Shelley; his future spouse, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would quickly write “Frankenstein”; her stepsister, Claire Clairmont; Lord Byron; and Byron’s physician, John William Polidori, wrote ghost tales.
Mr. Sands’s Shelley suffered from drug-fueled hallucinations and was stricken by fears and devils. Gabriel Byrne’s Byron was almost demonic.
“I feel these portraits are rooted in actuality,” Mr. Sands informed The Instances in 1987. “If individuals suppose in any other case, it’s due to the later Victorian whitewash of them. These weren’t merely lovely Romantic poets. They had been subversive, anarchic hedonists pursuing a selected line of amorality.”
Inside two years, Mr. Sands had labored with Mr. Ivory and Mr. Russell, two administrators with wildly totally different types.
“James Ivory is like an Indian miniaturist, and Ken Russell is a graffiti artist,” Mr. Sands informed The Instances. “James Ivory is like an ornithologist watching his topics from afar, whereas Ken Russell is a big-game hunter filming in the midst of a rhino cost.”
Mr. Sands additionally labored on a number of movies with the British director Mike Figgis, amongst them “Leaving Las Vegas” (1996), wherein he performed a pimp, and “The Lack of Sexual Innocence” (1999), wherein Mr. Figgis fused the story of Adam and Eve with that of a filmmaker (Mr. Sands) drifting out and in of his sexual recollections.
“Since this can be a movie of pictures quite than phrases, it requires an excessive amount of presence and expressiveness on the a part of the actors,” Kevin Thomas wrote in his assessment of “The Lack of Sexual Innocence” in The Los Angeles Instances. “Fortunately, Figgis has chosen nicely, with Sands effortlessly carrying by far essentially the most demanding position of a person of isolating self-absorption.”
Julian Richard Morley Sands was born on Jan. 4, 1958, in Otley, England, to Richard and Brenda Sands and grew up in close by Gargrave. He started performing as a baby, impressed partially by his mom’s work in novice theater. When he was 6, he informed The Yorkshire Submit in 2013, he appeared in a play; his first line was “My grasp, the nice Aladdin.”
He studied on the Central College of Speech and Drama in London however left in 1979 to kind a youth theater that carried out at faculties and golf equipment. His display profession started within the early Nineteen Eighties, with small roles in films like “Oxford Blues” and “The Killing Fields,” and in “The Solar Additionally Rises,” a mini-series primarily based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel.
Mr. Sands’s different roles included a photographer in “The Killing Fields” (1985), an entomologist in “Arachnophobia” (1990), Louis XIV in “Vatel” (2000), Jor-El, Superman’s father, in two episodes of the tv sequence “Smallville” (in 2009 and 2010), and a sadistic farmer within the Czech movie “The Painted Chicken” (2019), an adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel a couple of homeless and abused boy throughout World Battle II.
“I used to be drawn to ‘The Painted Chicken’ due to its unflinching, stark however in the end redemptive consideration of human endurance,” Mr. Sands informed the web site Moviemaker in 2020. “The awful hinterland of war-torn Jap Europe is as lovely and shifting as it’s disturbing and grotesque.”
Mr. Sands appeared onstage sometimes and earned a Drama Desk nomination in 2013 for his one-man present, “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” Mr. Sands carried out the present, which was directed by John Malkovich, on the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan in 2012 (and once more in 2016) and took it to Houston; Sarasota, Fla.; East Lansing, Mich.; and different cities over the course of a number of years.
The main focus was not on Pinter’s performs however his poetry. Mr. Sands, who had recognized Pinter since 1987, stepped in for the ailing playwright at a studying of his verse in England in 2005; they remained shut till Pinter’s loss of life three years later.
“I’ve known as it up to now a ‘Homeric night of theater,’” Mr. Sands informed The Washington Submit in 2015, “as a result of it’s me, in a pool of firelight, with the viewers gathered across the fireplace, at a shamanic stage.”
Mr. Sands’s survivors embody his spouse, Evgenia Citkowitz; his daughters, Natalya and Imogen; and his son, Henry. His marriage to Sarah Harvey led to divorce.
Mr. Sands liked climbing within the Los Angeles space, particularly on Mount Baldy.
“I will need to have been up Mount Baldy about 200 instances, so I feel this can be a actual favourite,” he was quoted as saying in “My Metropolis, My Los Angeles: Well-known Individuals Share Their Favourite Locations” (2013), by Jeryl Brunner. “And I prefer it in winter. Winter situations make it a bit extra attention-grabbing.”