Hikers found human remains on Saturday in a mountain area in Southern California where British actor Julian Sands disappeared five months ago, authorities said.
The body was discovered around 10 a.m. in the wilderness near Mount Baldy.
It was transported to the coroner’s office for identification next week, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement.
Sands, an avid hiker and rock climber, was reported missing on Jan. 13 after taking off from the summit that rises more than 10,000 feet east of Los Angeles. The region was ravaged by severe storms during the winter.
On Friday, his family released the first statement since Sands’ disappearance.
“We continue to hold Julian in our hearts with fond memories of him as a wonderful father, husband, explorer, lover of the natural world and art, and as an original and collaborative artist,” the statement read.
Known for his roles in Oscar-nominated films, including 1985’s A Room With A View, Sands was reported missing by his family on Jan. 13 after disappearing while hiking in the Mount Baldy area of the San Gabriel Mountains in California.
Julian Sands is pictured sitting on a summit of Weisshorn Mountain in the Swiss Alps in September 2022
Search crews have worked tirelessly to locate the famous actor. Their latest search mission involved more than 80 search and rescue volunteers, deputies and personnel. The mission deployed two helicopters, drone crews and aerial surveys to look over Mount Baldy in some of the more remote areas, but the missing actor was not found
Sands, a 65-year-old British-born actor best known for his role in the 1985 film ‘A Room With a View’, is married to journalist Evgenia Citkowitz and has three adult children.
Sands, 65, was reported missing by his family after disappearing into the dangerous mountain range
Since Sands’ disappearance on Jan. 13, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has conducted eight searches.
Their most recent search mission, on June 17, included more than 80 volunteers, staffers and deputies, but found no trace.
Mount Baldy towers over Los Angeles and is about 10,064 feet high.
The mountain has been described by skilled hikers as one of the deadliest mountains in the United States and has been reported as having one of the worst death and injury records in the US. The Los Angeles Times reported.
According to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, there have been more than 100 searches for missing hikers on Mount Baldy since 2020, with six confirmed dead.
A map of the area where 65-year-old Julian Sands was reported missing
The region is home to some of the most popular trails in Los Angeles, California
His family reported him missing at 7:30 p.m. on January 13, and rescuers recovered a snow-covered car, which was towed away
Sands’ first major production was 1984’s The Killing Fields, the critically acclaimed historical drama about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (pictured next to John Malkovich)
Pictured: Sands and Helena Bonham Carter on set for the award-winning 1985 film A Room With A View
Sands and his wife, American journalist Evgenia Citkowitz, married in 1990 and share two children together
Sands was born in 1958 in Yorkshire, Northern England to mother Brenda who raised him and his four brothers alone after her divorce.
He was privately educated at Lord Wandsworth College, a boarding school in rural Hampshire, before making the leap into acting.
Sands initially landed small roles, co-starring with Anthony Hopkins in the 1983 TV movie A Married Man and appearing in Privates on Parade, about a military entertainment group in Malaysia in the late 1940s.
His first major production was 1984’s The Killing Fields, the critically acclaimed historical drama about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Sands played the role of journalist Jon Swain in the three-time Oscar-winning film.
But the following year it was his turn in the adaptation of the classic EM Forster novel A Room With A View that propelled Sands to stardom.
Playing the philosophical and free-thinking George Emerson, he falls in love with Helena Bonham Carter’s character, Lucy Honeychurch, with a Florentine pensioner in the period drama.
The pair locked lips in a poppy field in what is considered one of the most romantic kisses of all time on screen.