JULIAN SANDS: MAKING ROOM FOR MORE SUCCESS

There is something engagingly scruffy and disheveled about Julian Sands. His clothes appear to have been plucked at random from some mission barrel in Skid Row, possibly late at night after the decent stuff had gone.

And, in conversation, it soon becomes clear that the only impact this British actor cares to make is on the screen as an actor.

Well, he’s doing just fine.

It was Sands who romanced the uptight Helena Bonham-Carter in that stylish Merchant-Ivory movie “A Room With a View.” Since that time he has made “Gothic” for director Ken Russell (it opens here April 24), gone to Spain for “Siesta,” directed by Mary Lambert and, most recently, starred with Linda Hunt in an upcoming TV version of Harold Pinter’s play “The Room,” directed by Robert Altman.

And now he’s off to Ecuador to make a new movie for Columbia, “Vibes.”

So--no complaints.

If you saw “The Killing Fields,” you may remember Sands in a small role as a sympathetic British journalist.

“The role was so tiny I’m surprised that people even remember me,” he said in Los Angeles the other day, “but they seem to, which is gratifying.”

Then what did he do?

“The wrong thing. I made the original ‘B’ movie--’Oxford Blues’ with Rob Lowe. Not good, I’m afraid.”

And then?

“Along came ‘A Room With a View.’ And to be honest, when I made that film I thought it might play the Curzon (a London art house) for about a month, and then that would be it. So its success delighted me. It seems to suggest that a lot of people have been yearning to see a little romance on the screen. In recent years film makers seem to have been embarrassed by romance and steered well clear of it. Maybe ‘A Room With a View’ will change that slightly.

“I know from letters I’ve received that our kiss in that Italian cornfield (Sands and Bonham-Carter) was more of a turn-on for some people than an explicit sex scene could ever have been.”

Eleven years ago, just after he had joined the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and was facing, as he says, “three years of prancing about in leotards,” Sands wrote to Ken Russell, a director he admired, and said, ‘Offer me anything in one of your films and I’ll pack up here.’ ”

Nothing came of that, but exactly 10 years later Russell sent him the script of “Gothic” with an offer to play the key roll of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“Gothic,” which has already opened in Britain, is a Russell-eye view of what went on at Byron’s house in Switzerland when Shelley and wife-to-be Mary Godwin came to stay the night.

“In the story, with everyone high on laudanum (Shelley was an addict of the opiate), we decide to hold a seance and summon up demons,” Sands said.

“That, of course, gave Ken full reign to use his vivid imagination. We wind up in the basement being hurled about by poltergeists.” (It was during this visit that Mary dreamed up the gothic horror story “Frankenstein.”)

“I enjoyed it all enormously. Compared with making ‘A Room With a View,’ which was like joining a quiet tea party, working with Ken was like being in the midst of a fireworks display. His combination of instinct and imagination is formidable.”

In his latest movie, “Siesta,” shot in Spain and starring Jodie Foster and Isabella Rossellini, Sands plays a guardian angel--”It’s ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ meets ‘Dante’s Inferno,’ ” he said with a chuckle.

Anxious, when he finished it, to star in what he hopes will be a commercial Hollywood movie, Sands then plumped for “Vibes,” to be directed by Ken Kwapis (“The Benniker Gang”)and starring Jeff Goldblum, Peter Falk and Cyndi Lauper.

This adventure film, which has just started shooting in Ecuador, is about a search for a lost city in the Andes. In it Sands plays a sort of Dr. No character, rich and powerful.

Sensing that at last he is on his way as an actor, Sands, who is 29, has moved from London and set up base in New York.

“There is such an element of luck in this business,” he said. “Being in the right place at the right time just when a director is ready to make a decision about casting. But that’s not really why I moved. I love New York and I have lots of friends there. Living there is going to be very exciting.”