Julian Sands was the English screen actor who emerged in the 1980s in a generation of floppy-haired, high-cheekboned exquisites that included James Wilby, Rupert Everett, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth. But Sands turned out to be a rarer, stranger and more exotic flower than any of them, virtually impossible to cast as a conventional lead and almost as difficult as a character turn. And this was due to his extraordinarily (and to his fans, hypnotically) eccentric screen presence – distrait, elegant, deadly serious and otherworldly – and that utterly distinctive voice: softly melodious, slightly strangulated, nasal and decelerated; he delivered lines at about 60 to 70% of the speed at which other actors spoke. These were mannerisms that became more pronounced and sometimes baffling as he got older. And yet there was always a charisma in his oddity that gave him a long and busy screen career, particularly in horror and cult movies in which audiences loved him.
