Julian Sands was never meant to die at home in bed. For all his outward demeanor of an archetypal English public-school boy, he was, just millimeters below the surface, a wild man: Heathcliff, but with a sense of humor—a blond and kempt Tarzan, irresistible and impossible, charming and brutal, wicked and adorable. He was outward-turned, his eye raking the horizon, buttock muscles clenching and unclenching, ready for conquest.

The manner of his demise shocked but did not surprise anyone who knew him. He obviously threw down the gauntlet to Mount Baldy, about an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles, and Mount Baldy, abetted by the atrocious weather, won. No doubt Julian accepted his destiny with equanimity. One force of nature overwhelmed by an even greater one.

Helena Bonham Carter commented at the time that he was always suddenly disappearing, and then as suddenly popping up again, and she fully expected him to emerge at any moment in Rajasthan or Reykjavík. That, alas, did not happen. But she was onto something.

My own early experience of Julian was very much of the popping-up variety. I first glimpsed him in 1978, as an improbably glamorous assistant to the costume-and-set designer Antony McDonald on a play I was acting in, in a converted and crumbling synagogue in the East End of London. Julian stood there at Antony’s side, radiating inner energy, nose sharp, features aquiline, cheekbones etched, and eyes glistering: an image of exhilarated concentration, as, notepad in hand, he jotted down our measurements. He said nothing, simply smiled and twinkled away, as if he were playing a party game whose rules forbade speech. A noisy group of actors, turning a corner, fell silent in his presence. It was quite a moment.

A couple of weeks later, I went to audition for the director Derek Jarman, who was making a film about Caravaggio. Jarman lived above a theater on the Charing Cross Road. I climbed the stairs and rang the bell. The door was opened by a faintly familiar figure: Julian Sands, in a butler-like white jacket. He said, “Hello again. Come right in.” This was the first time I had heard him speak: an attractive voice with a slightly soft r, which of course made it irresistible.

Jarman asked me to read for him; Julian filled in the other parts. After a brief and pleasant chat with the director, I left, ushered out by Julian. My principal memory of the encounter was, indeed, of Julian, hovering enigmatically.

A month or so later I visited some actor friends in their flat in Swiss Cottage in North London. They were abuzz with talk of their mystery co-tenant, a startlingly dishy trainee instructor at the nearby Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. His rent for six months, it seemed, had been paid in one go. He hardly spoke, they said; his brief appearances in the flat before he disappeared into his room were chimerical. Oh, and his name was Julian Sands.

A month later, a rave review appeared in The Times of London for a production of the little-known Auden-Isherwood play The Dog Beneath the Skin. The director? Julian Sands.

A blond and kempt Tarzan, irresistible and impossible, charming and brutal, wicked and adorable.

The pace began to heat up: the following year he burst onto the screen in the blockbusting The Killing Fields, in which, to some acclaim, he played the Sunday Times journalist Jon Swain.

The next I heard of him after that, I was sitting opposite him at a celebratory, pre-shoot supper party for A Room with a View. Who was this guy? Some kind of Aryan Zelig?

The formerly cryptically smiling youth had meanwhile become a roaringly confident and even more streamlined figure; as we walked toward the dining room, he looked as if he were striding through an oncoming wind—keen, bright-eyed, focused. He was the center of energy at a table not notably stocked with shrinking violets.

We quickly became friends in Florence during the early days of shooting on the film, only my second—his sixth. He was passionate and articulate about acting and the theater, and determined to have a very good time when we weren’t filming.

He took particular pleasure in a place I had stumbled onto known as Whisky a Go Go, which turned out to be a cross-dressing disco—not any old cross-dressing disco, mind: it specialized in truck drivers in drag, imperfectly squeezed into their frocks; the empties were cleared away by a cross-dressed dwarf.

The whole Fellini-esque scene was about as far away from Forster’s Florence as could be imagined, and Julian ate it up. To see him cavort on that mad dance floor was awe-inspiring. The truck drivers cleared plenty of space for him.

A couple of months later, sedately ensconced in Kent, he, Rupert Graves, and I approached the skinny-dipping scene in Forster’s Sacred Lake with some trepidation. It was early summer, but very cool, deep in the forest. Would the water be freezing? We were promised that it would be nicely lukewarm. And would we be filmed naked? Tony Pierce-Roberts’s camera, James Ivory assured us, would cleverly shoot us from the waist up.

Both promises turned out to be barefaced lies. We repaired to our trailer, sitting around in our underwear for what seemed like a very long time. Bored, Julian idly picked up a metal coat hanger and started bending it with rapid movements. “We used to do this at boarding school,” he said, his eyes glinting. “If you do it really fast, the bend in the metal becomes”—here he suddenly leaned toward me and applied the white-hot metal to my left upper arm—“very hot.”

I screamed with pain, Julian roared with laughter, and Rupert leaped back, alarmed; this was like something out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. “What are you doing?,” I screamed at Julian. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “It’ll cool down quite quickly. It always used to at school … ” I indicated that I didn’t give a fig for what they did at school; I was now branded for life, the thought of which delighted him even more. From then on in our friendship, which inexplicably survived this incident, he was known as The Brander. I looked at the scar the other day and became rather emotional.

A year or two after that incident, Julian rang me. He’d been offered the part of Shelley in Ken Russell’s Gothic. What should he read? Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit, I said. Did he want to meet Holmes, whom I knew?

Julian was passionate and articulate about acting and the theater, and determined to have a very good time when we weren’t filming.

We fixed a meeting at my top-floor flat, in Earls Court, from which we would go on to supper. Holmes arrived in good time, and made his way up to the top after I buzzed him in. He and my partner, Bruno, and I chatted amiably, and then suddenly Julian was in the room. How had he got up there without me letting him in? The door, he said, was open. Aha.

We sat down for a while, then made our way downstairs. When we arrived on the ground floor, the door was on its hinges. What on earth had he done that for? He said he thought the door had been stuck. I chose not to make a scene and temporarily shored up the door, and we went to the restaurant.

After a deeply informative and very merry evening, Holmes went off and Julian and Bruno and I returned to the flat for a nightcap. Entering the porch, Julian kicked the door open again. Roundly abusing him, I sent him off into the night, never to darken, much less tear down, our door again.

The manner of Julian’s demise shocked but did not surprise anyone who knew him.

That Christmas, Bruno and I went to Tunisia; when we returned to Earls Court, the wallpaper on the porch had had the words THE BRANDER WAS HERE carved into it. I phoned Julian.

“What is the matter with you?,” I said.

“I wanted to have lunch with you,” he said. “I booked a table and came to pick you up, but you weren’t there.”

“We were in Tunisia.”

“I didn’t know that. I was very disappointed.”

“Julian, this is mad behavior, and I am very cross.”

But somehow, annoyingly, I wasn’t. When I next saw him, blond and roguish and full of sweet talk, I succumbed as always. Apart from when he was kicking doors down, he had perfect manners, and was perceptive and enthusiastic and very kind.

I saw little of him for some years because he had moved to Los Angeles. We bumped into each other at a party and had a very warm reunion. He invited me to his house in West Hollywood, where I met his wife, the enchanting Evgenia Citkowitz, and his three adored children. Somehow, entirely typically, the house he had chosen to live in had belonged to a silent-movie actress, who had bequeathed it to her ever loyal chauffeur, who promptly turned it into a brothel. It had elements of both of these existences, mansion and bordello.

It was also entirely characteristic of Julian that when I visited, he was organizing a trip up a nearby mountain with his girls, planning it like a military maneuver. It was by his standards a very small mountain, but he was taking no chances. He was in astonishingly good shape, then in his early 50s, every muscle in his body taut and ready for action.

I wish that he had played more men of action on film—Hannibal or Sir Richard Burton or Shackleton, perhaps. Instead, ever surprising, the most notable of his later performances was in the theater, a gently probing rendition of some of Harold Pinter’s poems, directed by his great friend John Malkovich. It was very engaging in its low-key way, but the Julian who to our eternal dismay perished on Mount Baldy was a heroic figure, one of the most charismatic and electrifying figures of our time.

The Times of London recently opined that Julian had a Byron-esque attraction to women—but that irresistible attraction was universal, shared by men, women, children, and, as I have witnessed with my own eyes, dogs, who knew him as one of their own.

Julian Sands, actor, was born in Otley, U.K., in 1958. He died this year, aged 65

Simon Callow is an actor and director, and the author of several books, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of Orson Welles