Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
My Haven
JULIAN SANDS The actor, 62, best known for A Room With A View, in the sitting room of his farmhouse in Kent
1 THE ART OF FILM-MAKING
When we filmed A Room With A View in Florence in 1985, we needed extras with a period look and hired a bearded fellow called Patrick Hamilton who looked like an Edwardian and taught art in Florence. He became a friend. He did this sketch of my co-star Helena Bonham Carter and me, which I think is beautiful. Helena was only 19 at the time. I was in my 20s and had been in the film The Killing Fields, so I felt like a veteran, but looking back I was pretty immature.
2 AXE MAN
I’ve taken this ice axe to the Eiger, the Matterhorn and
Mont Blanc. I love the mountains and climb all over the world. As a boy growing up in Yorkshire, my four brothers and I spent time on the crags and fells. As I got older, the hills got bigger. The highest peak I’ve scaled is Aconcagua in the Andes, at 6,962m, and I’ve also climbed in Antarctica, Greenland and Asia.
3 MY MENTOR
When I was studying drama in London, Derek Jarman [the late director and artist] was a friend and mentor. This is one of his paintings – he was like a shaman and the first truly bohemian person I knew. I appeared in a music video he filmed with Marianne Faithfull for her song Broken English. David Bowie failed to turn up so I stood in for him, wearing a mask.
4 ROCK STAR
As a boy I used to go out with a small geological hammer and a haversack in the Yorkshire Dales looking for fossils – these are part of my collection. I went on to do geology at A-level and thought about it as a career. As a boy I also spent a lot of time with my late mother, going to museums, galleries and country houses, and I remember the first time I went to the Geological Museum in London with her after we’d seen Tutankhamun at the British Museum. I still enjoy looking for fossils – I was in Yorkshire recently for my younger brother Quentin’s birthday and we went out to see what we could find.
5 BRUSHES WITH PINTER
Harold Pinter was a huge figure to me. I was in a film of his play The Room with Annie Lennox in 1987 [left], then stood in for him at a recital of his poems in 2005 when he had throat cancer – he sat in the third row mouthing the words, which was intimidating. Afterwards he gave me this signed copy of his biography and a photo of himself.
6 FLEX APPEAL
When my wife Evgenia was pregnant with our daughter Natalya in 1996 she took a yoga class. I saw the change in her and embraced yoga too. This mat was given to me when I first began to practise by our teacher Diane Gysbers, who studied with the master BKS Iyengar – he’s in the photo on the radiator. The portrait of me to the left was made by our younger daughter Imogen when she was six. She’s 20 now but I still hold it dear.