He studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London but left in 1979 to form a youth theater that performed at schools and clubs. His screen career began in the early 1980s, with small roles in movies like “Oxford Blues” and “The Killing Fields,” and in “The Sun Also Rises,” a mini-series based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel.
Mr. Sands’s other roles included a photographer in “The Killing Fields” (1985), an entomologist in “Arachnophobia” (1990), Louis XIV in “Vatel” (2000), Jor-El, Superman’s father, in two episodes of the television series “Smallville” (in 2009 and 2010), and a sadistic farmer in the Czech film “The Painted Bird” (2019), an adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel about a homeless and abused boy during World War II.
“I was drawn to ‘The Painted Bird’ because of its unflinching, stark but ultimately redemptive consideration of human endurance,” Mr. Sands told the website Moviemaker in 2020. “The bleak hinterland of war-torn Eastern Europe is as beautiful and moving as it is disturbing and grotesque.”
Mr. Sands appeared onstage occasionally and earned a Drama Desk nomination in 2013 for his one-man show, “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” Mr. Sands performed the show, which was directed by John Malkovich, at the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan in 2012 (and again in 2016) and took it to Houston; Sarasota, Fla.; East Lansing, Mich.; and other cities over the course of several years.
The focus was not on Pinter’s plays but his poetry. Mr. Sands, who had known Pinter since 1987, stepped in for the ailing playwright at a reading of his verse in England in 2005; they remained close until Pinter’s death three years later.
“I’ve called it in the past a ‘Homeric evening of theater,” Mr. Sands told The Washington Post in 2015, “because it’s me, in a pool of firelight, with the audience gathered around the fire, at a shamanic level.”
