My wild, romantic friend Julian, and why I’ll never forget that A Room with a View screen kiss

He was her mischief-making co-star in the romantic comedy that launched both their careers. A week after the death of Julian Sands was confirmed, Helena Bonham Carter writes movingly about her ‘strange, wonderful enigma of a friend’ – and that indelible screen moment

The kiss that started it all... Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands in ‘A Room with a View’ (Alamy)

I suppose it is fair to say it started with a kiss. 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. It has been the chosen film clip that news broadcasters keep running.

It’s strange in many ways, not least that it was almost 40 years ago. But I think Julian would have liked it as an epitaph; at least, as something to dissipate the atmosphere of his haunting departure on an icy mountain top in California. It contained promise, and hope, and romance, and a real sense of time stopped, which film uniquely does.

Through the happy success of the Merchant Ivory film, I suppose I am indelibly linked with Julian in the public imagination, but I can’t say I knew him very well or was consistently close to him over the years. Julian was one of those who, when with you, was passionately so present and immediate. You gained quality in exchange for brief time. He had a real talent for friendship, and for what Forster urged us to do in the face of all ambition: “Only connect!”