‘I’ll miss him every day of my life’: John Malkovich on the death of his close friend Julian Sands

Actor is godfather to Sands’ eldest child, Henry

John Malkovich, who was very close friends with the British actor Julian Sands, has opened up about the death of his friend.

The A Room with a View star, 65, vanished while hiking in the Mount Baldy area of southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains in January.

Five months later, on 28 June, Sands was confirmed dead after his remains were found by other hikers.

Speaking to People on Wednesday (5 July), Malkovich, 69, said that he and Sands were “the greatest of friends since we met doing a film called The Killing Fields in 1983, the first film I ever did”.

“We stayed incredibly close since then,” he said. “I’ll miss him every day of my life, but such is life. You lose a lot along the road until you’re lost. And that’s the way life ends, I’m afraid. I’m very sad about it, but obviously of course mostly for his children.”

Malkovich, who is godfather to Sands’ first son Henry, added: “At my age, we get used to people dying. Many of my friends and colleagues are already gone, and I’ll join them one of these days. Such is life.”

In an interview that Sands gave just a month before he disappeared, he talked about how dangerous his hobby of mountain climbing was, saying: “You may be confronted with human remains and that can be chilling. It’s not necessarily supernatural, it’s possibly all too natural – what I would call hypernatural.”

Sands was an experienced and competent mountaineer, with his hiking partner and fellow actor Kevin Ryan previously telling the PA news agency that he was “the most advanced hiker I know”.

Searches by local authorities had been unsuccessful in the search for Sands, with poor weather conditions hampering efforts since March, until his remains were found by civilian hikers last month.

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Sands and Malkovich in ‘The Killing Fields’ (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

A week after Sands’ death was confirmed, Helena Bonham Carter wrote movingly in The Independent about her “strange, wonderful enigma of a friend”, who she starred with in A Room with a view.

“I suppose it is fair to say it started with a kiss,” she wrote. “An onscreen embrace that launched both our film careers. I was just 18. It always makes me think I had the best luck to have known Julian Sands.

“In the past few days, since his death has been confirmed, friends have told me I’ve been all over the news, kissing him time and time again, in that scene lifted from A Room with a View – a kiss sequence on a Tuscan hillside between our characters, Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson, from EM Forster’s 1908 novel.”

Read the full piece here.