Steven Spielberg changed the game 22 years ago when he released the dinosaur epic Jurassic Park, which remains one of the most successful and popular movies Hollywood has ever seen. Among those featured in the movie were kid actors Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards, who played the forever-traumatized grandchildren of Richard Attenborough. In the two decades since becoming famous for running from velociraptors, where are they now? We dug up some pretty interesting facts to catch you up to (carbon) date.
Now, here's something that'll make you feel super-old: Richards, now 36 (!) tied the knot with her hubby, Mark Bolton, in 2013, and is currently expecting her first child, due in November 2015. “My husband and I are thrilled,” Richards told PEOPLE in June. “This is really a wonderful moment for us. It's super exciting.”
According to PEOPLE, over the years Richards shifted from acting to painting, which is now her main professional focus. “I love to work with people in the art and express their story on canvas and my impression of them and what they want to express and use oils, brushes, canvas to create something that will last the generation,” she revealed. Now reportedly in South America for her art tour, Richards says she's living a “much quieter” but “still very rich” life compared to her days in the glitz and glamor of Hollywood. “My life story these days, I still experience the red carpet as an artist,” she said. “But on a day-to-day basis I live kind of a country life.”
According to a 2011 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Richards sent Spielberg a watercolor self portrait of herself that was inspired by one of the scenes in Jurassic Park, which now hangs in Spielberg's office. For his part, Spielberg is a pretty good gift-giver, too. “He never fails to send me something around Christmas,” Richards said. “When he finds people he likes, he's really good at keeping in touch.” And here we thought we couldn't love Spielberg more than we do already.
Richards' movie career pretty much began and ended with the Jurassic Park franchise. She last appeared in a movie in the 1997 sequel, The Lost World. Subsequent acting gigs were on an incredibly smaller scale; TV movies like Broken Silence: A Moment of Truth Movie (1998) and Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001) are among the titles. No, we've never heard of them either.
Also in her interview with The Wall Street Journal, Richards—who graduated from Skidmore college in 2011—admitted she hasn't altogether ruled out a return to acting. “Sometimes I'm on the the pulse of what's happening in Hollywood,” she said, “but other times, I'm just totally absorbed by what I'm creating on the easel.” Adding to PEOPLE, she said: “If some great role or project finds me, absolutely that could be a nice thing to do, for sure.” Here's hoping she paid attention to Jurassic World's record-breaking box office returns…