Passionate: Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands in A Room with a View. By Getty
It was the impulsive kiss in the Italian Poppy Field where the late Julian Sands achieved his version of immortality. The scene in A Room with a View (1985) is remembered as the most iconic moment in the most beloved play of the English period of its era.
In a wrinkled cream blazer that somehow defines both character and actor perfectly, after fanning himself with a matching fedora in the midday heat, Sands' George Emerson takes over the day. He turns and seems to surprise even himself as he steps up to the lens to embrace the face of a bewildered Helena Bonham Carter as the virgin ingenue Lucy Honeychurch.
In the role of Chi il bel sogno di Doretta Puccini from “Rondina”. as it swells, this romance breaks through repressed Edwardian chatter and marks the beginning of something, albeit for a time and an end. A storm breaks out, the companion (played with nervous stiffness by Bafta-winning Maggie Smith) disapproves, and the lovers are separated. This is how the curtain closes at the opening act in Florence.
In many ways, the scene could have gone wrong if that landmark production of The Ivory Merchant, which ushered in their golden age, had done a weaker job of casting George – a free-thinking child of the Enlightenment, the son of a bumbling but kindly under-middle-class journalist. (Denholm Elliott, wonderful) to whom everyone has a strange dislike. George had to appear intelligent, yet have a showy enough figure to get away with this opportunistic kiss and keep the audience on his side.
Sands completed this assignment, and then several others: in his usually reserved, casual manner, he was such a perfect choice for this role that it became difficult to know what to do with him next. Unlike Daniel Day-Lewis, who played George's romantic rival in the same film, he didn't offer the character's role here to expand his portfolio – and besides, that brawler, Cecil Weiss, lured DDL into some of his most campy, finicky acting. . Unlike George Sands, he hardly showed off. He just became one, leaving an impression as smooth as it was oddly indelible, and would almost never play a romantic role again.
He had squandered that chance a few years earlier when he originally starred in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), which ended up starring Christopher Lambert. It would be an intriguing challenge for Sands to erase his bookish, well-educated appearance and become an indigenous lost child of aristocrats: blond hair could be a serious advantage. Instead, he had to wait. A small role in The Killing Fields (1984) as foreign correspondent John Swain kept him on the Goldcrest Films list, which was featured on almost every major British hit of the 1980s, including A Room with a View.
Immediately after that, Sands was to play Maurice, a repressed gay man from E. M. Forster's next film adaptation of Trader Ivory and perhaps a figure closer to Cecil than to George. To the eternal gratitude of James Wilby, another tall, blond actor who ran in the election, he withdrew for reasons he never really discussed in later years. In fact, he only lingered to make another British film, playing the beautiful, paranoid Shelley – not just romantic, but romantic – in Ken Russell's Gothic (1986), before fleeing to Hollywood, where there are many strange roles. , like everyone else, from male witches to crazy surgeons.
Sands, of course, wasn't the only actor to become famous for Room with a View, which has become the most famous and well-known Merchant Ivory film in the quarter-century since its inception. Bonham Carter's debut in it made her every casting director's favorite, pale and interesting English rose, and she'll return to the company to play a little more mature in Howards End (1992). Rupert Graves, as her cocky brother Freddie, will return as Jaeger Alec Scudder in Maurice, and this part will suit him too. “/>Astounding: Julian Sands got his start with 'A Room with a View' Credit: Kurt Krieger – Corbis
The other most famous frontier scene is the infamous wild swimming naked in what the honey churches call their “sacred pool”. In it, Graves and Sands are joined by Simon Callow's Reverend Bebe, all diving and splashing like Greek forest deities, returning to an uninhibited state of childish delight.
The button-down Cecil, who walks by on a walk with Lucy, acts like a perfect prude, while George from Sands screams and doesn't care. In fact, he's the only character who doesn't show a hint of embarrassment, just lets it all hang out: he may be the least nerdy or retarded person in the entire Ivory Trader canon. Perhaps after he dropped all the stitches and turned his heads on both sides of the Atlantic, he simply felt that vests and moral propriety no longer suit him.
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