You saw him here, you saw him everywhere. One moment Julian Sands was in turn-of-the-century Florence, as the dashing Edwardian Englishman George Emerson opposite Helena Bonham Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch in Merchant Ivory’s sumptuous costume drama A Room with a View (1985); the next, he had spiders crawling all over his face in Frank Marshall’s creepy-crawly comedy Arachnophobia (1990). You might find him as Romantic poet Percy Shelley in Gothic (1986), or as a snarling eastern European pimp in Leaving Las Vegas (1995). He loved Harold Pinter, but that didn’t stop him from appearing in erotic Italian movies such as 1991’s Husbands and Lovers. He worked with everyone from visionary British director Derek Jarman to Hollywood horrormeister Jason Blum.
To call Sands – who has been confirmed dead, months after he went missing during a walking trip in the Californian mountains – versatile is to understate his talent hugely. The debonair English actor from the Yorkshire Dales popped up in every kind of movie imaginable. He could do toffs and he could do thugs – and just about everything in between as well. Auteur directors from Mike Figgis (with whom he collaborated countless times) to David Cronenberg, Wim Wenders and Terence Davies all clamoured to work with him. He made films in England, Europe and the US.
