Julian Sands spoke of feeling “chilled” by the discovery of human remains when pursuing his love of climbing, in his last UK interview before he died on a solo hike in California.
The 65-year-old actor was a committed climber and said he increasingly ventured out alone. “Pals I used to climb with have stopped going to the mountains,” partly because rock faces had become more unstable with climate change, and partly because of age, he told the Radio Times.
“If you don’t really have the desire, the focus for climbing a route, if you’re not absolutely committed, it becomes much more dangerous.”
He added: “I’ve found spooky things on mountains, when you know you’re in a place where many people have lost their lives, whether it be on the Eiger or in the Andes. You may be confronted with human remains and that can be chilling.”
Best known for his roles in the Oscar-winning film A Room with a View and the TV dramas 24 and Smallville, Sands said he valued the landscape and wildlife of the California mountains more than gatherings of Los Angeles stars.
Climbing was about “solace” and “existentialist self negation”, he said.
In an article about the actor for the Guardian last week, his closest collaborator, the director Mike Figgis, said he recalled conversations with Sands “about the kind of burials where they’d put your body on a mountain, animals would come and eat you and then you’d become part of that kind of cycle”.
Sands disappeared on 13 January during bad weather in the Baldy Bowl area of the San Gabriel mountains. Air and ground searches were launched but were hampered by deadly storms, icy conditions and a threat of avalanches.
Human remains found by walkers nine days ago were formally identified as belonging to the actor. The cause of death is still being investigated.
Sands’ family said: “We continue to hold Julian 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.”
Sarah Jackson, Sands’ agent, said: “He was a passionate climber, and we draw consolation from knowing that he passed in a place he loved, doing what he loved.”
In a Q&A with the Guardian in 2020, Sands said he was happiest when he was “close to a mountain summit on a glorious cold morning”.
He recalled a brush with death during a climb in the Andes in the early 1990s when he got caught in a storm above 20,000ft with three others. “We were all in a very bad way. Some guys close to us perished. We were lucky,” he said.
Writing for the Guardian, Sands’s friend, the actor Gabriel Byrne, shared an excerpt from Sands’ most recent email. In it, Sands wrote:
Most mountaineers understand that the true summit is within. The high point on a peak is simply that, but the experience of the approach, the face or the ridge, up and down, is where true fulfilment is found.
