Julian Sands obituary: Free-spirited actor whose career started with a kiss

Julian Sands and Helena Bonham Carter starred in A Room With A View

Actor Julian Sands, whose death has been confirmed five months after he went missing, was a magnetic presence on screen - whether playing romantic heroes in films like 1985's A Room With A View, villains like in TV's 24, or offbeat roles in cult releases.

Sands earned a place in millions of hearts as the dashing George Emerson in A Room With A View.

At one point in the Merchant Ivory epic, George perched precariously among the branches of an olive tree on an Italian hillside, listing life's most important things at the top of his voice: "Beauty! Liberty! Joy! Love!"

His father, played by Denholm Elliott, explained matter-of-factly that George was simply "declaring the 'eternal yes'."

Lucy Honeychurch, played by an 18-year-old Helena Bonham Carter, staggered into a field to trace the commotion. He strode through the tall barley and gathered her in a passionate embrace without saying a word.

It was the scene that turned Sands into an idol for a generation, and helped make the Oscar-winning film a timeless romance.

"That was totally improvised, right at the last minute," Bonham Carter later recalled. They had waited "for days" for the right light and weather conditions to film the scene.

"Suddenly it was, 'You're on! Let's just do the kiss! Julian, stand there. Helena, walk.'

"It's very hard to walk across a ploughed field in high heels. Oh, God it was hard work. I just knew I had to get to him without falling down. And not laugh when he kissed me.

"And then my mum came, and that was really off-putting to Julian. He had to kiss me again in the bushes somewhere, and mum was bang in his eye-line, so that was putting him off."

George Emerson found the "eternal yes" in that Italian valley, and in some ways the actor was on a similar quest throughout his own life.

The film provided breakthrough roles for both Bonham Carter and Sands

A Room With A View, the all-star adaptation of the EM Forster novel, won three Oscars and five Baftas. It has since been named one of cinema's most romantic films by both Entertainment Weekly and The Guardian.

The newspaper's Laura Barton was among those who fell for George Emerson.

"There was lust in there, certainly," she wrote in 2014 of the feelings he stirred. "How not to blush before a man so startlingly handsome and so given to passionate kissing amid Italian fields? But there was another kind of desire in me, too.

"Part of it lay in his approach to life, in his embracing of the 'eternal yes' - in his fondness for painting Thoreau quotations on wardrobe doors and question marks on picture frames, as well as for climbing up into the trees and shouting at the sky: 'BEAUTY! JOY!' until he falls from the branches."

Speaking about his character in 2015, Sands said he could "connect to him without too much difficulty".

Sands and Bonham Carter reunited in 2014

"I liked the character and I liked the romance," the actor said. "And I liked the sort of quietly subversive intelligence and humour that George Emerson brought.

"He was a person who had this wonderfully loving, permissive father who gave him the freedom of the hills, if you like, to be himself."

However, the movie was almost scrapped when a producer tried to call off filming two days before it was due to start, Sands claimed in 2019.

He told Decider: "They said, 'We can't do this, nobody will ever see it.' And I think they said, 'We're going to cancel it unless you offer the George Emerson role to John Travolta!'

"I'm very much a fan of John Travolta, but - for no personal reasons - I just don't think he would've been right."

Sands certainly was right for the role, and told Decider it was "a real coming-of-age story, actually, both for the character and - to some extent - for me, too".

A Room With A View was one of Sands's first films, following parts in The Killing Fields and Oxford Blues.

Sands played a scientist who discovered a deadly new spider in Arachnophobia

He then took projects that piqued his interest alongside those that paid his rent, portraying romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in director Ken Russell's Gothic, and appearing in spider-filled thriller Arachnophobia and supernatural horror Warlock.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2018, Sands said: "I didn't want to become a Hollywood actor. I was looking for something exotic, things that took me out of myself. I think I found myself a little boring."

In 1991, he played a shapeshifting centipede in David Cronenberg's adaptation of William Burroughs's surrealist masterpiece Naked Lunch. The movie was, not unsurprisingly, unconventional and polarising - and flopped at the box office.

Two years later, Boxing Helena was was even more controversial. Sands played a surgeon who keeps a crash victim captive, with Madonna and Kim Basinger both pulling out of playing the female lead before Sherilyn Fenn stepped in.

"In general, the films which are more interesting to me tend towards the cult film variety," he told BBC Radio 2 in 2011. "And that's always kept me interested and engaged in what I do as an actor.

"I regard it as a great good fortune that I've been given the opportunities to work with such bizarre and far-ranging independents."

Sherilyn Fenn co-starred in Boxing Helena after Madonna and Kim Basinger pulled out

On television, the former leading lothario was known for playing the terrorist Vladimir Bierko in US action drama series 24, and Superman's biological father Jor-El in Smallville.

"I was very honoured to play Jor-El, because he'd only been played before, I think, by Marlon Brando," Sands said. "I liked Smallville. I found it very touching. I mean, it's a domestic story about people growing up."

He added: "As an actor, people quite often do ask you, 'What do you want to play?' But I really have no idea. I respond to other people's ideas about who I should play."

On the radio he played gadget master Q in BBC Radio 4's adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. He also returned to A Room With A View to play George Emerson's father in a 2019 audio adaptation.

And he starred alongside Peter Capaldi and Jack Lowden in 2021's Benediction, a biographical film about war poet Siegfried Sassoon.

"The truth is," he told the Guardian, "once you have been around long enough and have some experience, confidence and independence, there is a tremendous letting go of the things that are intrusive in your career: Ambition, narcissism, jealousy, vanity, insecurity."

Julian Sands and John Malkovich were co-stars, friends and briefly flatmates after the former split up with his first wife

In 2011, Sands appeared on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for a A Celebration of Harold Pinter, directed by his old colleague, friend and former flatmate John Malkovich.

The pair also worked together in a radio drama about a chimpanzee who appeared in the Tarzan movies, and Malkovich once said of his friend: "He is a Tarzan... He's a physical entity of a physical force."

'A free spirit'

Beyond acting, hiking was one of Sands' great passions, although he had long been aware of the risks.

In the 1990s, he got caught in a storm while hiking in the Andes. "We were all in a very bad way. Some guys close to us perished; we were lucky," he said.

That didn't stop him setting out for more summits, however.

When asked in 2020 what made him happy, Sands replied: "Close to a mountain summit on a glorious cold morning."

He had not entered acting for fame and fortune, he told Radio 2, but because it is "a lifestyle" and "a philosophy".

"You embrace it for what it is, the freedom it gives you, the freedom of being an artist.

"I think to be a free spirit is the greatest thing in my life, and that is what I've tried to do."