The ending was hinted at for days and finally the mystery was solved in the most tragic way. Most of the human remains found by some climbers on Mount Baldy, north of Los Angeles last Saturday, actually belong to Julian Sands, the 65-year-old British actor who went missing in the same area last January.
This was confirmed by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, the jurisdiction to which these mountains belong, after forensic analysis of the bones. Sands’ fate – who was born 65 years ago in Otley, a small town north of Leeds in the heart of England – pushed him to do what he loved most: hike his beloved mountains. Some mountains are very dangerous, more than the thousands of hikers who hike there every year can imagine. Between 2017 and 2022, search and rescue teams were deployed to help 233 people, and eight died on the steep slopes, which are over 3,000 meters high. In winter, temperatures are below freezing and snow can be up to 40 centimeters deep.
Exactly on January 13, the trace of the interpreter was lost, although it was another six days before the police made it public that he was one of the two hikers missing in the area. “Sometime that day he went for a walk, and when he didn’t come back, his family reported him missing,” Gloria Huerta, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, told the AP agency at the time.
Agents in January were able to locate specific signals from Sands’ cellphone pointing to a popular trail called the Baldy Bowl Trail, and this area has always been the focus of their search. In January, patrols were suspended due to the region’s most violent storms in four decades, leaving frost and up to 12 feet of snow in their wake. But since then there have been up to eight search attempts that lasted more than 500 hours. The last took place over the weekend of June 17, when brigades, volunteers, planes and even drones again swept the site, again without success.
On those same days, for the first time in nearly six months, the actor’s family made their feelings public with a statement: “We continue to carry Julian in our hearts with fond memories of him as a fabulous father, husband, explorer and lover of nature and art.” and as an original and collaborative actor”.
Over the course of his extensive career, which began in the early 1980s, Sands appeared in dozens of films and series. The last years of these eighties and the first nineties were the most brilliant of his professional life, when came the challenges that made him famous and which, years later, allowed him to assert himself as a supporting actor in small roles. Notably James Ivory’s 1985 A Room With a View, in which he shared the spotlight with then debutante Helena Bonham-Carter, brought him popularity and he decided to move to Hollywood to find success. And he achieves it. Then came Warlock the Witcher (1989), Arachnophobia (1990) and Leaving Las Vegas (1995). He was chaining together smaller projects and small roles as early as the 1990s, although he managed to stand out in almost half a dozen episodes of “24” or in a few “Smallville” episodes in which he played Superman’s father. His most recent project was Seneca, a film by Robert Schwentke about the philosopher with his 40-year best friend, John Malkovich; He also left behind a posthumous project he oversaw the cast of, The Piper, a dark take on the popular fable The Pied Piper directed by Erlingur Thoroddsen, which hits theaters this summer.
John Malkovich spoke about exactly what he calls his “closest friend” at the presentation of the film about Seneca at the Berlin Film Festival last February, barely a month after Sands’ disappearance. Speaking to The Guardian, in which he first spoke publicly about the missing interpreter, he said he was “an experienced mountaineer and climber”. “He was always hiking around Kilimanjaro, Antarctica, the Andes or the Alps… he was a skilled mountaineer who had dangerous experiences,” he explained of Sands, already speaking of him in the past tense. “My understanding is that the particular conditions of that day on Mount Baldy resulted in an immediate and catastrophic failure that proved irreversible. That tells me my instinct. But he knew the conditions were there, and that’s what he loved. I’ve found a great outlet in that.” “He’s a guy who grew up in a wasteland, and while he’s incredibly educated and brilliant, he’s always retained that wild part of him.”
Sands was a father of three children. The eldest, Henry, who took part in some rescue missions, is a journalist and communications consultant. Born in 1985, he is the result of his first marriage to writer and journalist Sarah Sands, who was head of media outlets such as Reader’s Digest and The London Evening Standard, whom he divorced in 1987 after three years of marriage. Speaking to the Times last April about his father’s disappearance, Henry said he was “realistic” about the impact of extreme weather conditions on the search for his father and thanked them for their extensive efforts.
John Malkovich is Henry’s best man and it was he who introduced Sands to his second wife, Evgenia Citkowitz. The journalist and writer is also American, has an Israeli father and a British aristocratic mother, through whom she is a descendant of the well-known and multi-million dollar Guinness family, the founders of the brewing empire. Sands and Citkowitz married in 1990, lived in Los Angeles and had two daughters, Natalya (26) and Imogen (23).
Mountains have been Julian Sands’ great passion for decades, so the capital city of Los Angeles and its surrounding area, full of mountains, trails and canyons for hiking, an activity widely practiced by locals, was a perfect location for him. In a 2020 interview with British newspaper The Guardian, Sands was asked about his greatest fears: “inactivity, immobility, illness and boredom.” He also recounted that his great desire was to “climb the peak of the Himalayas.” and recalled the moment he was closest to death: “In the early 1990s we were overwhelmed by a terrible storm in the Andes over 6,000 meters along with three others [compañeros]. We were all very bad. Some people near us have died; we were lucky.” Sands was also clear about what his greatest fortune was: “To be on top of a mountain on a wonderfully cold morning.”
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