Julian Sands is Missing

Well that bites. I remember him from way back when he was the romantic lead in Room with a View with an angelically beautiful Helena Bonham-Carter.

I feel like the Washington Post could have been a little more tactful with their obituary.

https://wapo.st/3JBehQt

(gift link)

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We know he enjoyed ranging widely, that’s why it took so long to gain closure!

I watched Julian Sands a few months ago in Seneca… just a minor role, sadly.

Confused that none of these articles mentioned the other hiker, but it turns out they weren’t together. The original article just was about two unrelated missing people, and I just associated them in memory. It seems Bob Gregory of Hawthorne also didn’t make it.

Hiking alone is dangerous!

Went on a local hike last evening and found out friends from my hiking group were the folks who found his body.

I’d say that hiking alone adds some risk, but not much. Hiking alone is, in general, far safer than hiking in heat or hiking on steep snow-covered slopes or fording a stream or driving a car to your trailhead, all of which pose risk whether you’re by yourself or not.

We’re both quite a bit younger than the two guys who disappeared, though. It really seems, just from years of observing these stories, not collating evidence or anything, that once you get past, say, 60, hiking alone is just a bad idea.

What’s wild to me is I grew up at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains, and just don’t recall stories of hikers dying up near Mt. Baldy. It’s rugged, but there are people along those trails pretty frequently – as a kid we hiked/ran/explored all over the mountain. However, if you google “mount baldy deaths” there are a ton of stories of people dying along those trails going back decades, so I’m guessing it just wasn’t as newsworthy in the past.

The tricky word in there being “say”. It really depends.

I often wonder what it would take for me to accept that I can no longer do something, like, clean the gutters, drive a car, etc. Unfortunately, it seems most older people (or adult children of older people) need an accident to happen in order to force this kind of realization and maybe acceptance. You just hope it’s not fatal.

This was an interesting, abstract thought experiment when it was about my grandparents and then my parents. But now I’m starting to wonder about a few things myself…

And one of those things I’m wondering about is my future in hiking (or just taking long walks) on my f*cked up flat foot!

I’d type more but I have to go… I have an appointment with an orthopedist in 45 minutes. :D

I’m 60 and hike all the time by myself. I’ve hiked for 45 years and don’t plan on stopping for a long time. Like everything it all depends on the individual. I might climb Mt Baker this summer solo. It’s all in your mindset.

Also, your bodyset.

You can do a lot to mitigate risk with a satellite emergency beacon. But if you have a heart attack or fall off a cliff, well, it was your time.

Yeah, that’s the problem. Sometimes you get a little older and your mind gets unset, and most people don’t and maybe can’t realize it.

Aw man, bummed to hear that they weren’t able to locate him alive. Think the first time I saw him was as the bad guy in Warlock. Not a great movie, but Julian and Richard E. Grant were pretty great!

I mean, the chances of someone going missing in January still being alive are…remote.

Yes and sorry I got a little sensitive to your post.

A lady a few days ago told my 17 year old kid that he has “such a nice grandfather”. Omg.

I gotta get over it. And yes, be more cautious at times.

Haha, yeah, that had to sting. It’ll happen to meeeee (although not exactly since I don’t have kids, although I guess if I had one right now…).

I’m sure you are nice, though.

Just saw this lovely post written by Lucy Walker on Instagram and thought I’d share…

Aww, thanks for posting that, @rrmorton. That was sweet.

My strongest recollection of Julian Sands – and for a serious British actor of his caliber, I imagine this would be dismaying : ) – isn’t Room with a View or even the goofy Warlock movies, but Mike Figgis’ one-take split-screen movie Timecode. Julian Sands plays a hapless Hollywood masseuse hired to tend to a bunch of studio executives during a meeting. He’s mostly just a sight gag, hovering around the edges of the screen, poised to massage.

But there are a few scenes where he starts massaging Stephen Weber, the actor from Wings, who plays one of the studio execs. Sands is rubbing Weber’s shoulders, and he starts in on his scalp while Weber is trying to do his lines. And remember this is an incredibly complex ninety-minute take across four separate cameras moving around separate locations, all carefully timed to coincide at the end. I think it took at least four tries before Figgis actually got a complete runthrough?

So Julian Sands is running his fingers through Weber’s hair, playing it completely straight as you’d expect from any British stage actor, and TV actor Weber starts to break. He’s an American TV actor, after all, and the kind of work he does is mostly mugging, with maybe a live studio audience happy to be in on the jokes, so he’s probably not very good at sinking into a scene the way Sands is. But the two of them create a sort of transatlantic comedic hybrid of Sands vigorously and earnestly massaging Weber while Weber pretends not to laugh as he’s doing his dialogue. It’s a microcosm of the British empire demonstrating its superiority over feckless colonial shenanigans, and Sands seems to relish it.

Sadly, I couldn’t find a clip online, otherwise I’d link it.