Julian Sands Dies at 65; Actor Played Shelley, a Warlock and a King

Julian Sands, a flexible British actor whose movie roles included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Louis XIV, a warlock, Superman’s father and a Latvian pimp, was pronounced useless on Tuesday, greater than 5 months after disappearing whereas mountaineering alone on a path on Mount Baldy within the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California. He was 65.

On Sunday, authorities recovered human stays close to the mountain the place search crews had been on the lookout for Mr. Sands. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department stated it had been contacted by hikers who had discovered human stays within the Mount Baldy wilderness. Dangerous situations, together with a collection of extreme storms, had sophisticated search efforts.

The coroner’s workplace recognized the stays as Mr. Sands on Tuesday. It added that the reason for his dying remained underneath investigation.

With his shock of blond hair and his often icy demeanor, Mr. Sands was immediately recognizable. He might slip simply from a fancy dress drama like James Ivory’s “A Room With a View” (1985), during which he performed an idealistic romantic across the flip of the Twentieth century, to an occult film like “Warlock” (1991), during which, because the title character, he flees a Seventeenth-century witch hunter to Twentieth-century Los Angeles.

“He was always good, always gallant and dignified,” Janet Maslin, a former New York Times movie critic, stated in a cellphone interview. “I don’t remember a false move from him.”

Mr. Sands performed Shelley in Ken Russell’s horror movie “Gothic” (1987), which recreates a true story: a gathering on a stormy evening in 1816 in a Swiss villa the place Shelley; his future spouse, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would quickly write “Frankenstein”; her stepsister, Claire Clairmont; Lord Byron; and Byron’s physician, John William Polidori, wrote ghost tales.

Mr. Sands’s Shelley suffered from drug-fueled hallucinations and was affected by fears and devils. Gabriel Byrne’s Byron was practically demonic.

“I think these portraits are rooted in reality,” Mr. Sands informed The Times in 1987. “If people think otherwise, it’s because of the later Victorian whitewash of them. These were not simply beautiful Romantic poets. They were subversive, anarchic hedonists pursuing a particular line of amorality.”

Within two years, Mr. Sands had labored with Mr. Ivory and Mr. Russell, two administrators with wildly completely different kinds.

“James Ivory is like an Indian miniaturist, and Ken Russell is a graffiti artist,” Mr. Sands informed The Times. “James Ivory is like an ornithologist watching his subjects from afar, whereas Ken Russell is a big-game hunter filming in the middle of a rhino charge.”

Mr. Sands additionally labored on a number of movies with the British director Mike Figgis, amongst them “Leaving Las Vegas” (1996), during which he performed a pimp, and “The Loss of Sexual Innocence” (1999), during which Mr. Figgis fused the story of Adam and Eve with that of a filmmaker (Mr. Sands) drifting out and in of his sexual recollections.

“Since this is a film of images rather than words, it requires a great deal of presence and expressiveness on the part of the actors,” Kevin Thomas wrote in his evaluate of “The Loss of Sexual Innocence” in The Los Angeles Times. “Happily, Figgis has chosen well, with Sands effortlessly carrying by far the most demanding role of a man of isolating self-absorption.”

Julian Richard Morley Sands was born on Jan. 4, 1958, in Otley, England, to Richard and Brenda Sands and grew up in close by Gargrave. He started appearing as a baby, impressed partly by his mom’s work in newbie theater. When he was 6, he informed The Yorkshire Post in 2013, he appeared in a play; his first line was “My master, the great Aladdin.”

He studied on the Central School of Speech and Drama in London however left in 1979 to type a youth theater that carried out at faculties and golf equipment. His display profession started within the early Eighties, with small roles in films like “Oxford Blues” and “The Killing Fields,” and in “The Sun Also Rises,” a mini-series primarily based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel.

Mr. Sands’s different roles included a photographer in “The Killing Fields” (1985), an entomologist in “Arachnophobia” (1990), Louis XIV in “Vatel” (2000), Jor-El, Superman’s father, in two episodes of the tv collection “Smallville” (in 2009 and 2010), and a sadistic farmer within the Czech movie “The Painted Bird” (2019), an adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel a few homeless and abused boy throughout World War II.

“I was drawn to ‘The Painted Bird’ because of its unflinching, stark but ultimately redemptive consideration of human endurance,” Mr. Sands informed the web site Moviemaker in 2020. “The bleak hinterland of war-torn Eastern Europe is as beautiful and moving as it is disturbing and grotesque.”

Mr. Sands appeared onstage often and earned a Drama Desk nomination in 2013 for his one-man present, “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” Mr. Sands carried out the present, which was directed by John Malkovich, on the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan in 2012 (and once more in 2016) and took it to Houston; Sarasota, Fla.; East Lansing, Mich.; and different cities over the course of a number of years.

The focus was not on Pinter’s performs however his poetry. Mr. Sands, who had recognized Pinter since 1987, stepped in for the ailing playwright at a studying of his verse in England in 2005; they remained shut till Pinter’s dying three years later.

“I’ve called it in the past a ‘Homeric evening of theater,’” Mr. Sands informed The Washington Post in 2015, “because it’s me, in a pool of firelight, with the audience gathered around the fire, at a shamanic level.”

Mr. Sands’s survivors embody his spouse, Evgenta Citkowitz; his daughters, Natalya and Imogen; and his son, Henry. His marriage to Sarah Harvey led to divorce.

Mr. Sands cherished mountaineering within the Los Angeles space, particularly on Mount Baldy.

“I must have been up Mount Baldy about 200 times, so I think this is a real favorite,” he was quoted as saying in “My City, My Los Angeles: Famous People Share Their Favorite Places” (2013), by Jeryl Brunner. “And I like it in winter. Winter conditions make it a bit more interesting.”