Rescue crews continue to search for the British actor Julian Sands, who was reported missing after hiking in the San Gabriel mountains in California on Friday.
The 65-year-old actor, known for his roles in A Room with a View, The Killing Fields, and Naked Lunch, was reported missing in the Baldy Bowl area, which is popular with hikers and skiers, according to the San Bernardino county sheriff’s department.
The force has urged hikers to “think twice and heed warnings” after treacherous weather in the region. It said its search and rescue teams had responded to 14 calls on Mount Baldy and in the surrounding area over the last four weeks.
“On Friday, 13 January, at about 7.30 pm, a hiker, identified as 65-year-old Julian Sands of North Hollywood was reported missing in the Baldy Bowl area,” sheriff department spokesperson Nathan Campos said.
“Sheriff’s department search and rescue crews responded and began a search. Because of avalanche risks and trail conditions, the ground crews were pulled off the mountain on Saturday evening. However, we continue to search by helicopter and drones when the weather permits.”
Authorities are recommending that the public stay away from the area. “It’s extremely dangerous, and experienced hikers are having a hard time getting through there,” Campos said. As the weather clears, rescue crews are planning to resume a search on the ground, he added.
Authorities are also searching for another missing hiker, Bob Gregory, of Hawthorne, California, who was reported missing on Monday in San Gabriel mountains, ABC News reported.
On Thursday, it was reported that a snow-covered car thought to belong to Sands had been found and towed away by search crews.
Sands, who grew up in Yorkshire, has lived in the Los Angeles area for years with his wife, the writer Evgenia Citkowitz, with whom he has a son. He also has two daughters with former Evening Standard and BBC Radio 4 Today programme editor Sarah Sands, to whom he was married from 1984 to 1987.
The actor has had an eclectic, decades-long career in the film industry, appearing in dozens of film and TV roles. He became a major star after the 1985 release of the EM Forster adaptation A Room With a View alongside Helena Bonham Carter, Sir Daniel Day-Lewis, Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith.
The film, which received critical acclaim and won three Academy Awards, follows a young woman called Lucy Honeychurch (Bonham Carter) in the final throes of the restrictive and repressed culture of Edwardian England, and her developing love for a free-spirited young man, George Emerson (Sands).
Sands also appeared in Arachnophobia, Leaving Las Vegas, and TV shows including 24, Smallville and Banshee. He most recently played the chief medical officer in the 2021 Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi-led drama Benediction.
In a 2018 interview with the Guardian, Sands talked about his love of mountain climbing and the importance of continuing to embrace new adventures as he aged. In another 2020 interview, he described himself as at his happiest “close to a mountain summit on a glorious cold morning”.
The actor once conducted an entire interview from the face of the Mittellegi Ridge on the Eiger Mountain in the Swiss Alps. In 2020, he said the closest he had previously come to death 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.”
Colleagues in the TV and film industry, including film producer Cassian Elwes, actors Rufus Sewell, Barbara Crampton, Frances Fisher and Elizabeth Perkin have shared their hopes for Sand’s safe return.
Samuel West, who starred with Sands in 2004’s Sword of Xanten, tweeted: “Please, please let Julian Sands be OK. A friend and an inspiration. Awful news.”
Jim Piddock called the actor a “wonderfully talented and unique man and a delightful, generous friend” and said he was “hoping for a miracle”.
