Young actress Ariana Richards became the star of the 1993 film “Jurassic Park,” but we haven’t seen her since. What happened to her? We’ll tell you.
By the time Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi film Jurassic Park began filming, 13-year-old Ariana Richards was already a successful actress. Her father was a film producer, so it’s no surprise that Ariana, raised in the world of Hollywood, began acting as a child. Like many, she began in commercials, and in 1987, at the age of eight, she made her film debut.
In 1992, she won the Young Actors Award for Best Young Actress in a Television Film for her role in Switched at Birth.
And so Steven Spielberg cast Ariana as Lex Murphy, the granddaughter of Professor John Hammond, who conceived the fantasy dinosaur park. Audiences immediately fell in love with the sensible, computer-obsessed Lex, who is initially terrified of the wild, but then bravely confronts the attacks of the ancient dinosaurs and saves her younger brother.
The young actress was hit with fame for which she was completely unprepared.
“I wasn’t prepared for the huge number of people who would recognize me every day. I couldn’t even go out for lunch without people lining up to talk to me,” the actress admitted.
This role became the most iconic in Richards’s career. She also appeared in the sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, released in 1997, before suddenly disappearing from the screen.
Ariana didn’t want to continue her career in Hollywood—childhood actors often lose interest in the “dream factory.”
Richards switched to painting. Perhaps the actress’s genes played a role, as her maternal grandmother, of Italian descent, was a descendant of the Renaissance artist Carlo Crivelli.
Ariana now owns her own art gallery in Portland, Oregon. She is married to stuntman Mark Bolton, and they have a daughter.
“Sometimes I keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in Hollywood, but more often than not, I’m just completely absorbed in what I’m creating on the easel,” she told the Wall Street Journal in 2011.
By the way, one of her paintings hangs in Steven Spielberg’s office.
Richards keeps a low profile, but has made an exception for the premieres of new dinosaur park films—you might have seen her on the red carpet.
