![Julian Sands in 2011](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2023/06/28/TELEMMGLPICT000001155429_16879376871150_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqdTOTs03EjuZb891uz-lkHU0LoKc4qSRYG1k6EyxQm_I.jpeg?imwidth=680)
‘It’s about sacrifice and humility’: why Julian Sands loved climbing mountains
The British star's passion for climbing came before all else – and made him a better actor
![Julian Sands in 2011](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2023/06/28/TELEMMGLPICT000001155429_16879376871150_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqdTOTs03EjuZb891uz-lkHU0LoKc4qSRYG1k6EyxQm_I.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Think of a hiker and, depending on whether you’re in California or Yorkshire, you may imagine a sun-kissed hardbody posing at the top of a canyon for an Instagram shot or a rambler with an anorak, a laminated Ordnance Survey map and a thermos flask. Julian Sands, who had roots in both place, was very much more than either.
In January, when Sands was first reported missing in the San Gabriel mountains northeast of Los Angeles, his brother Nick said: “Julian’s first love is walking and hiking. It came before his career and he had enormous, phenomenal energy. When he walked up a mountain you could see the sparks on his boots and he’d wait for you at the top. He took risks. He has always been like this: wild, extreme, adventurous; never constrained by rules or boundaries. He can never just sit. He just wanted to expend energy, to hike and climb, to compete, to challenge himself.”
Sands, who was confirmed dead on June 27, once said that his greatest fear was “inactivity, immobility, ill health and boredom” and described himself as happiest when “close to a mountain summit on a glorious cold morning”, climbed all around the world, including the Andes and Indonesia’s Puncak Jaya, the highest mountain on an island and the only place in the country where you can find snow. It’s an arduous climb, requiring a weeks-long hike through remote jungle and some chasms which can only be crossed by Tyrolean traverse ziplines.
Sands also took on the Weisshorn in the Swiss Alps, from where he sent his grandson Billy pictures last September. The nearby Matterhorn may be more famous, but many mountaineers consider the Weisshorn both more beautiful, with its symmetrical triangular pyramid shape and pure white slopes, and more challenging too, combining a long and serious route with delicate rock pitches and steep snow climbing.
Sands once began a telephone interview by saying, “Right now I’m looking across the North Face of the Eiger towards the Jungfrau. Spectacular!” and rang the journalist back several hours later from a bivouac to impress upon him that, though he was climbing the Eiger, he was going up the easier Mittellegi Ridge rather than the feared North Face. “Mountain and climbing folk, and a small percentage of your readers, will know the difference.”
!['His first love is walking and hiking': actor Julian Sands](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2023/02/10/TELEMMGLPICT000322496792_1_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqx3uoNloVRe8tGIlezFo6_T_Y_at6flr7_SNJnNwBVxQ.jpeg?imwidth=350)
That was important to him, not to be seen as a blowhard claiming more than he’d done. “A lot of time, people who don’t climb mountains assume is about this great heroic sprint for the summit, and somehow this great ego-driven ambition,” he said. “But actually it’s the reverse. It’s about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains. It’s not so much a celebration of oneself but the eradication of one’s self-consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony hopefully with your environment. One thrives on enthusiasm, curiosity, humility.”
And on danger too, for every serious climber knows the risks they take. Sands described one of the most difficult mountains in the world, the Himalayan peak of Makalu, as “top of [my] bucket list”, and the closest he’d come to death before his final excursion in California was “in the early 90s, in the Andes, caught in an atrocious storm above 20,000ft with three others. We were all in a very bad way. Some guys close to us perished; we were lucky.”
That episode was on Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America and part of the fabled Seven Summits challenge, in which the climber has to scale the highest peak on every continent. Sands had done five – Aconcagua, Puncak Jaya (Oceania), Mont Blanc (Europe), Vinson (Antarctica) and Kilimanjaro (Africa) - and had only had Denali (North America) and Everest (Asia) left. The Seven Summits is a considerable undertaking in every way: the average cost of completing all seven is around £150,000.
![Julian Sands, who starred in A Room with a View, once said he was happiest when 'close to a mountain summit'](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2023/02/10/TELEMMGLPICT000001214073_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwWGUoDseFNqJElbWj8lWIVU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
More than one of Sands’ friends and fellow climbers referred to him as a Romantic in the poetic sense of the word, and Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was a magnet for him. He played Shelley in Ken Russell’s 1986 Gothic and read his poetry in live shows. “[Shelley] was inspired by big nature and the importance of nature as a major force in the lives of humans,” Sands said, and never more so than in his poem Mont Blanc, which describes the mountain as “a desert peopled by the storms alone/Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone”.
For Sands, clearly, his hobby and his craft overlapped in many places. “Mountain climbing and filmmaking are very connected,” he said. “There’s always another mountain. And ultimately the point of climbing a mountain is that the mountain is within. I think that’s true, too, of the acting experience. There is that sense of putting one foot out there, and anything can happen. Sometimes, it can be like being on the Mittellegi Ridge.”
When Sands was preparing to direct Neil Dickson in the one-man play The Standard Bearer, both men went off into the Sierra Nevada mountain range to build trust in each other. “In the wilderness it’s just yourselves,” Sands said. “And there’s a confrontation of yourself you find in the mountains, which is very revealing.”
![Julian Sands and Jeff Daniels in Arachnophobia (1990)](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2023/02/10/TELEMMGLPICT000324891840_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqbRF8GMdXQ5UNQkWBrq_MOJ7l27lL2GwsDfq_bqCh_mE.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Dickson remembered the moment well: “He was in his sleeping bag next to me, reading poetry. I thought, ‘This is mad, but it’s kind of different.’’’
And Sands of all people would have understood what Dickson meant when he said of the build-up to the theatrical run: “I was pacing backstage, going, ‘Am I mad? Why, why, why do I want to put myself through this at this point?’ [But] by the end of the second show, I came off and I thought, ‘That’s why I want to do it!’ The charge, the fulfilment of the whole experience, is fantastic.” That combination of nerves before and triumph after is one intimately known to every climber.
Every mountain and every trail is different: so too the parts which Sands took on. In the early 1980s, he was one of four men tested for the lead role in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. He lost out to Christopher Lambert, but in many ways he would have been perfect for the role. “He is a Tarzan,” said his close friend John Malkovich. “He’s a physical entity of a physical force.”
!['He’s a physical entity of a physical force': Julian Sands and Lori Singer in Warlock (1988)](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2023/02/10/TELEMMGLPICT000324891884_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqZbRQ2YQ8LDwJ14FnJSAwArxlL4JJZFr6G2BGlsAngeI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
After A Room With A View made Sands a star in 1985, he could have played the handsome leading man over and again, and almost become much more famous than he did. “I didn’t want to become a Hollywood actor,” he said once. “I was looking for something exotic, things that took me out of myself.”
He sought roles which he found interesting and challenging: a man who took the paths less travelled in every way, who always liked to be out there on the edge. He switched seamlessly between mediums and genres alike – a villain in 24; part of the experimental split-screen movie Timecode; on stage in a celebration of Harold Pinter; a surgeon who amputates a woman’s limbs to keep her captive in Boxing Helena; a monstrous shapeshifting centipede in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch; and many more.
But more than the roles and the climbs, Sands will be remembered for his generosity of spirit and joie de vivre. When asked “What is the most important lesson life has taught you?” He replied “to be nice, and grab it with both hands”. He was, and he did.