LOS ANGELES, United States - The body of missing British actor Julian Sands has been identified, California police said Tuesday, after human remains were found by hikers in mountains near Los Angeles at the weekend.

Sands, who shot to fame in 1985 for his role in "A Room with a View," went missing in January on the 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) Mount San Antonio, known locally as Mount Baldy.

Hikers found human remains on Saturday morning, alerting authorities, who responded to the scene and transported the body to the local coroner's office.

"The identification process for the body located on Mt. Baldy on June 24, 2023, has been completed and was positively identified as 65-year-old Julian Sands of North Hollywood," San Bernardino Sheriff's Department said in a statement.

"The manner of death is still under investigation, pending further test results."

No further details were provided.

ROOM WITH A VIEW

The 65-year-old's break-out role was plain-speaking George Emerson in the Oscar-winning 1985 adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel.

In the hit film from producer-and-director duo Merchant Ivory (Ismail Merchant and James Ivory), he seduced the prim heroine, played by Helena Bonham Carter, in sun-drenched Tuscany. He also stripped off for a memorable skinny-dipping scene.

Sands had already appeared as a British photographer in Roland Joffe's 1984 Oscar-winning drama set in Cambodia, "The Killing Fields".

In a varied subsequent career, Sands appeared in films as diverse as Frank Marshall's 1990 spider-themed horror romp "Arachnophobia", David Cronenberg's controversial "Naked Lunch" and alcohol-soaked 1995 drama "Leaving Las Vegas", directed by Mike Figgis and starring Nicolas Cage.

Sands told The Guardian broadsheet in 2018 of his career choices: "I didn't want to become a Hollywood actor" and "I was looking for something exotic, things that took me out of myself".

With angular good looks, Sands often veered towards darker roles.

He starred as a son of Satan in 1989 low-budget horror film "Warlock" -- alongside Richard E. Grant as a witch-hunter -- while his television roles included an appearance as a villain in US action series "24".

He also made critically acclaimed theatre appearances, including playing former British prime minister Tony Blair in David Hare's play "Stuff Happens" at London's National Theatre.

He also starred in a one-man show celebrating British playwright Harold Pinter, directed by his friend John Malkovich and first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011.

Sands told The Washington Post in 2015 that Pinter "was seminal in my desire to want to be an actor, even as a high school student in the 1970s".

The actor grew up in Yorkshire in northern England. His mother was a secretary and his father did agricultural soil surveys.

He studied at the renowned Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

After the success of "A Room with a View", he moved to Los Angeles.

He married writer Evgenia Citkowitz in 1990. He leaves behind three children including a son with his previous wife, British journalist Sarah Sands.

EXPERIENCED HIKER

Sands was an experienced hiker who described himself as happiest "close to a mountain summit on a glorious cold morning."

The closest he had come to death was "in the early 90s, in the Andes, caught in an atrocious storm above 20,000ft with three others," Sands told the Guardian in 2020.

"We were all in a very bad way. Some guys close to us perished; we were lucky."

The peak where Sands disappeared is the highest in the San Gabriel Mountains and a popular destination for Los Angeles residents.

San Bernardino County Sheriff at the time said it was increasingly treacherous, with eight known deaths between 2017 and 2022.

California was hit by a succession of heavy storms in December and January that brought heavy snow to mountain ranges, including to Mount San Antonio.

The actor's brother, Nick, said two weeks after search efforts began that he had accepted Sands would not be found alive.

"He has not yet been declared missing, presumed dead, but I know in my heart that he has gone," he had said, according to English local media in Yorkshire, where the brothers grew up.

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© Agence France-Presse