British actor Julian Sands has been confirmed dead at the age of 65. His death confirmation came five months after he was reported missing on January 13th.
He went for a hike on the San Bernardino County-area mountain in Southern California. His remains, mostly skeletal, were found on the mountains by hikers on June 25. According to the San Bernardino County Sherrif’s department, the county’s coroner identified the remains as belonging to the actor. However, the cause of his death remains is yet to be ascertained after results of tests come out.
Sands’ wife Eugenia Citkowitz reported him missing after he had gone hiking alone in California’s Mount Baldy, Saint Gabriel Mountains, which are 80 km northeast of Los Angeles. Backpackers, hikers and other adventurists usually prefer the slopping area just beneath the peak of Mount Baldy. The week Julian Sands had gone on hiking in the mountains, temperatures were coming down to four to minus four Celsius as authorities cautioned all travellers of heavy snowfall due to relentless winter storm for days.
Search to find Julian Sands was ongoing for five months, however, due to avalanche and bad conditions of tracks the search teams had to call of the work after 24 hours. The search however did not stop but the teams could not find anything.
According to the search, his last location was found on January 15 when he was headed in the direction of the ridge of Mount Baldy, said the sheriff’s department.
His family had lost all hope of finding Sands but they thanked the search parties for their efforts and the sherrif’s department posted a note of appreciation from Sand’s family on June 21, before his remains were found.
It read, “We continue to hold Julian in our hearts with bright memories of him as a wonderful father, husband, explorer, love of the natural world and the arts, and as an original and collaborative performer.”
In a 2020 interview Sands described himself to be most happy when “close to a mountain summit on a glorious cold morning.” He also described a lethal event while he almost touched death when he was climbing in the Andes in the early 1990s along with three other people when a storm above 20,000 feet caught them.
“We were all in a very bad way,” he recounted. “Some guys close to us perished. We were lucky.”
Julian Sands’ career
Sands’s acting career started with supporting parts in films like “Oxford Blues,” in which he played the primary character’s romantic rival, and “The Killing Fields,” in which he played a young war reporter in Cambodia.
After the success of “A Room with a View,” an Edwardian-era love story in which he was paired with Helena Bonham Carter as the leading male, Sands relocated to California in the 1980s.
The 1985 movie, which was set in England and Italy and was based on EM Forster’s 1908 novel of the same name, received eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture. It won Oscars for best adapted script, art direction, and costume design.
