With his shrewd eyes and his forks of corn-yellow hair, Julian Sands was a natural choice to play the valiant, romantic George Emerson, who snatches a kiss from Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) in a Tuscan poppy field in A Room With a View (1985). “I wanted him to be real, not a two-dimensional minor screen god,” he said. “I liked him in his lighter, sexier moments, less so when he was brooding.”
Sands, who has died aged 65 while hiking in mountains in California, was dashing in that film, but he could also project a dandyish, effete or sinister quality. He was blessed with a mellifluous voice and a lean, youthful, fine-boned face, even if, as a child, his brothers insisted he resembled a horse. (He agreed.) In James Ivory’s film of EM Forster’s novel, he was pure heart-throb material. His participation in the notorious nude bathing scene was no impediment to the picture’s success.
