Mariska Hargitay rediscovers her late mother, movie star Jayne Mansfield, in her directorial debut
After 26 seasons and counting playing Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Mariska Hargitay has been a TV star for so long that it’s easy to forget she’s a Hollywood scion, daughter of movie starlet Jayne Mansfield and Hungarian bodybuilding champion Mickey Hargitay. Mansfield, of course, hit it big in the 1950s as a big-screen sex symbol in such films as The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? — until her bright career was tragically cut short at age 34 when she was killed in a fatal 1967 car accident.
Hargitay was just three years old when her mother died; she and her siblings had been sleeping in the back seat of the car, but miraculously survived.
Robbed of her mother at such a young age, the tragic loss she experienced in childhood defined her life. Hargitay could only get to know her mother from a distance — via vintage photos, movies and the recollections of others.
That, however, is something she set out to remedy in My Mom Jayne, a new HBO documentary that drops this week. Marking Hargitay’s directorial debut, the film explores her mother’s life and legacy, offering viewers a heartfelt tribute to the late movie icon while also providing Hargitay with her own cathartic journey of discovery.
“The film follows Mariska as she seeks to know, understand, and embrace her mother for the first time,” states HBO’s synopsis of the new documentary. “Through intimate interviews and a collection of never-before-seen photos and home movies, she grapples with her mother’s public and private legacy and discovers the layers and depth of who Jayne was, not only to her audience but to those who were closest to her.”
For Hargitay, making the documentary — which had its official premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May — was an emotional experience that has been a lifetime in the making. “This movie is a labour of love and longing,” she said in a statement. “It’s a search for the mother I never knew, an integration of a part of myself I’d never owned, and a reclaiming of my mother’s story and my own truth.”
As Hargitay explained in an interview with Vanity Fair, making the film helped her to fill in the blanks in her childhood. “I don’t remember the accident. I don’t even remember being told that my mother had died,” Hargitay recalled. “I look at photos, and I don’t really remember anything until I was five.”
Among the film’s many revelations is a huge bombshell: the man she’d believed to be her biological father actually was not. That would be Nelson Sardelli, a one-time Las Vegas entertainer whom Mansfield had an affair with after briefly splitting from her husband, with whom she later reconciled.
As Hargitay recalls in the film, she was in her 20s when someone sent her a photo of Sardelli. She immediately recognized the resemblance, and the truth hit her like the proverbial ton of bricks. “It was like the floor fell out from underneath me,” she says in My Mom Jayne. “Like my infrastructure dissolved.”
The discovery that she wasn’t who she thought she was sent her reeling, realizing that she’d been “living a lie my entire life.”
Over time, she was able to reconcile it all, coming to a profound epiphany. “I grew up where I was supposed to, and I do know that everyone made the best choice for me,” she told Vanity Fair. “I’m Mickey Hargitay’s daughter — that is not a lie. This documentary is kind of a love letter to him, because there’s no one that I was closer to on this planet.”
Interviewed by Deadline, Hargitay confirmed that she’d achieved what she’d set out to do with My Mom Jayne: to come to an understanding of the mother who was taken from her. “I just longed and ached to know the real person and what made her tick and what made her afraid and what was her pain and her joy and all of that,” she said.
My Mom Jayne airs Friday, June 27, on HBO Canada