Julian Sands, whose remains were found Saturday and identified this week five months after he went missing while hiking near Mount Baldy in Southern California, emerged in the 1980s with a cohort of other actors who rode a British cinematic rebirth to Hollywood stardom. Those peers and sometime co-stars included Hugh Grant, Daniel Day-Lewis and Richard E. Grant, a new wave-era succession to the Angry Young Men of the 1950s and ‘60s.
Tall and blond, with cheekbones that could cut glass, Sands projected a simultaneously rakish, dashing and villainous persona that rendered any character he played complex. He counted such Romantic period figures as Franz Liszt (“Impromptu”) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (“Gothic”) among his cinematic repertoire.
Equally adept at the gentility of Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala (“Room With a View”) and the malevolence of “Warlock,” Sands charted an eclectic four-decade career that spanned movies and TV and included working with such edgy directors as David Cronenberg (“Naked Lunch”), Jennifer Lynch (“Boxing Helena”) and Mike Figgis (“Leaving Las Vegas”). Here are seven of Sands’ best-known roles and where to watch them, plus one that will require some sleuthing, along with previous coverage by The Times.
