Ariana Richards is perhaps most known for her role as Lex Murphy, the granddaughter of the man who founded Jurassic Park, in the classic movie. But what has she been up to since the popular 1993 film?
On September 11, 1979, Ariana Richards was born. She is a direct descendant of Carlo Crivelli, an Italian Renaissance painter. Since she has been painting her entire life, her ancestry has had a significant influence on her.
Background Info
When she was just seven years old, she started acting and was discovered for a role as a dancer in a hair salon ad. Soon after, she played Kimberly Mays in the TV movie Switched as Birth, which served as the basis for her first film role. In the movie, two families each brought the incorrect child home from the hospital. They don’t learn until one of them falls ill and sadly dies. Richards even received a nomination for Best Young Actress for the part.
When she starred in Locked Up: A Mother’s Anger the following year and played Kelly, the little daughter of a lady who was falsely accused of drug dealing by a man she was dating, she received the same prize once more.
She continued acting in various movies during the early 1990s, including Tremors, Space Invaders, and Timescape. She additionally had cameos on sitcoms including The Golden Girls and Boy Meets World.
Jurassic Park
Her most recognisable performance was as Lex Murphy in Steven Spielberg’s iconic dinosaur movie Jurassic Park. Her persona represented one of Hammond, the park’s foundergrandchildren. ,’s She and her co-stars Laura Dern and Sam Neill spent the most of the movie running and hiding from the dinosaurs. Even in the kitchen scene, where she and her brother are hiding from the velociraptors, she managed to steal the show. As a computer knowledgeable kid, Lex was able to use the park’s computers to the group’s advantage and save the day.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which came out in 1997, had Richards reprising the part. The second of the original franchise’s three movies had a similar plot to the previous one but featured new actors including Julianne Moore and Vince Vaughn in addition to Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcom.
After Jurassic Park
Richards would play the lead role in the high school comedy-drama Angus right after Jurrasic Park. The film received positive reviews from reviewers, but it only brought in $4.8 million at the box office. Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, she would go on to play supporting roles in a number of TV movies and shows.
Her final film credit before a ten-year break came in 2001 when she returned as Mindy Sterngood in the straight-to-video sequel Tremors.
In 2013, she made a comeback as an actor and landed the role of Donna Voorhees in the television movie Battledogs, which is about a werewolf virus that is ravaging the world. After then, Richards hasn’t been in any more movies.
What is Ariana Richards doing now?
She probably paints when she isn’t working in the film industry. She has always loved painting; in fact, she even created a self-portrait in watercolour from her famous Jell-o sequence in Jurassic Park and gave it to director Steven Spielberg, who hung it in his home. She attended college to pursue a career in the arts, and she earned an art degree from Skidmore College. Since then, she has given up acting in favour of a career in the visual arts.
She draws inspiration from early impressionists like Van Gogh and Monet, but, like her ancestor Crivelli, she also incorporates Baroque and Italian Renaissance elements into her oil paintings. She frequently paints landscapes and portraits, and several of her works have even received honours. All of her work is displayed on her website, where you can also buy some of her paintings. Also, you have the choice of commissioning one!
Richards has explained to fans why she no longer performs in interviews that acting is in her blood and she loves it, but she simply prefers to concentrate her attention on painting.
She has gained notoriety for herself in both acting and movies, but she has also dabbled in music. She created an album in the 1990s that was only available in Japan and had a small record run. It’s no longer in print, and finding it online is still difficult.
She currently resides in Oregon, where she can be surrounded by nature and create stunning landscape paintings. In 2013, she got hitched to Mark Aaron Bolton. He is an Irish stuntman who has performed on several TV programmes, including Grimm and Z Nation. Together, the couple has one daughter.
If you want to see more of her daily activities, you can follow her on Instagram, where she posts photos of herself travelling to fan conventions, having brunch, and standing on the red carpet for the upcoming Jurassic World premiere events.
