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

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!”

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He also had a great talent to disconnect, which makes his death – on a mountain, after an agonising six-month search – horribly and eerily fitting. Until the other day, I had a sneaking hope that maybe he’d reappear, as in my experience of him he’d done incredible vanishing acts before. It was part of his pattern – of my strange, wonderful enigma of a friend. Coco Chanel once said that in order to be irreplaceable, you must dare to be different. Well, Jules was effortlessly different, and always daring.

I remember, in New York in 1985, doing publicity for A Room with a View; we were two ingenues being launched into the world of film. At a forbidding “grown up” dinner with Merchant Ivory, he turned and whispered to me: “Helly, don’t worry, I’m just going to the toilet.” He never came back.

After about half an hour we did start to worry. We phoned his friend John Malkovich, with whom he was staying, who said that they were wondering where he was because he was meant to be dining with them! So Julian managed to escape not one but two dinners. From then, I recognised he was a social Houdini who often went awol.

I can’t remember how he explained it the following day. But no doubt with that nonchalant charm of his that he had in abundance. He was lovable and forgivable, but ultimately for me, despite all his urgent immediacy and loquacity, he was also private and unknowable.

As always when someone dies, one is bombarded with memories – an interior random scrapbook of the mind begins to form, all of its images starring the departed one. I feel I was so lucky to have known the man. And A Room with a View was such a sunny experience that I want to share those bits of my scrapbook in an effort to dispel the tragedy of his death. The sunny must conquer the dark. As he said on a video I found this week on my iPhone: “Helly, I am nothing if not an optimist.”

When I first met him in my audition for A Room with a View in the Merchant Ivory London flat, I remember him being supremely odd, reading the screen directions as part of his dialogue. As a young, earnest actress, I thought: “Jesus, well he’s not going to get the part.” Looking back on it, I would not have put it past Julian to deliberately do the wrong thing. He was foremost a provocateur and a mischief-maker, unafraid to push the boundaries. It was what made him exciting. He raised the temperature of the room. Even so, I was seriously surprised when he was cast. Mind you, I also couldn’t believe that I was.

We found ourselves in Florence, where he was George and I was Lucy. He was physically big and strong, monumental even – a different proportion to most. I remember thinking while filming in the Loggia, in the Piazza Signoria (which Ismail Merchant had RENTED for the day), that if he took clothes off he could stand in for Michelangelo’s David. With a sling. Fearless and ready to slay a Goliath. It would have been very Julian.

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Alternatively, he could have been a satyr. There was a side of him that was animalistic, wild and anarchic. He led the naked merriment around the Sacred Lake when we were back shooting in England. When the male cast were asked to strip off and bathe naked, they were somewhat understandably self-conscious. Julian was boisterous and bold and bacchanalian.

For all his huge, robust, envelope exterior, he was softly spoken, gentle, and very solicitous to me. When we filmed A Room with a View I was 18, muddled, out of my depth, and incredibly uncomfortable and hot in my corset and leather boots in Tuscany in May, as well as terrified by the grown-up acting giants who surrounded me – Maggie Smith and Judi Dench and Denholm Elliot. Julian was my gentle giant of a friend.

The kiss that has been endlessly played on a loop on the internet was in fact totally unrehearsed and somewhat thrown together. It was shot at “happy hour”, when there’s a special magical light at sunset, which always turns out to be, as a filming experience, “panic hour”.

We were on the hill, in a field of poppies – which I remember thinking had no sign of a cornflower, unlike the description in the book – when the director, Jim Ivory, told me to quickly approach George further down the hill (difficult to negotiate clods of earth in period heels without face-planting). And then he shouted “Julian! Just grab her and kiss her,” which he did, with great certainty and passion. This was just as well, as I was at the age when I wasn’t too confident about going for a kiss in normal life, let alone on camera in front of 40 or so people.

We had to kiss again for the end honeymoon shot, when Lucy and George come back to Florence and finally have their perfect room with a view. Except there was no room. Just a flimsy plywood window frame built by the set designer on someone’s roof garden. We balanced atop with a 100ft drop below into the Arno. Julian again went for the kiss with total commitment, as I clenched my buttocks like a bicycle stand around the window sill with equal commitment. I think, if you look closely, you can see traces of hysteria. He grabbed life and love as well as me.

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And then there was a third kiss in Kent, when he unexpectedly went bashful. “I can’t kiss her with her mother within my eyeline.” Mum was removed from the set. Kiss ensued.

There is a point when – sometimes when acting opposite someone – you don’t know where the seam lies between the actor and the role. It’s a kind of sewing, knitting of souls, and for me, the fictional George and the real Julian were indistinguishable. Julian could have been totally capable of walking into a hotel room and wordlessly turning round a picture to hide the question mark he’d drawn on the back. (Though Julian himself would probably have done it the other way round.) He would have been totally capable of shouting “Love, truth, liberty!” from the top of a tree.

When we were filming in Kent – naturally he wasn’t staying where the rest of us were – we were routinely woken up by Julian driving through the village at the crack of dawn and shouting “GOOD MORNING FROM GEORGE THE KNOB!” like a human cockerel. And so, we started our day with a smile.

He was maverick, unexpected, deeply intelligent; he could be languidly seductive, teasing, then gentlemanly courteous. He was serious, concerned, earnest; he was a searcher, and an ardent romantic.

His end is characteristic because it will carry the mystery that he always carried. But I don’t want my friend to be forever defined by his end. He was too original. I’ll choose to frame it in my heart that he went as he always did – escaping, and seeking beauty and freedom. He was where he wanted to be, in the mountains that he loved. Thank you, Jules, for the moments only you could have created. And all the kisses.

Shelley, one of his favourite poets, wrote: “We are a portion of those we ever loved.” So I’ll carry Jules within, and I might even go up to Parliament Hill, climb a tree, and shout “Beauty!” from it. For and because of Jules.