Mariska Hargitay was just three years old when her mother Jayne Mansfield died in a car accident.
Now, the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star is exploring her mother’s life, death and legacy in a new documentary called My Mom Jayne, which is streaming on HBO Max in Australia from June 28.
The documentary had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, an industry event that held a special place in Jayne’s heart.
“Obviously I’ve grown up with images of my mother. There were certainly a lot taken,” Mariska told Deadline at the time. “But the photos of her in Cannes in particular were always so meaningful to me because of how free and happy and in love she was with my father. And so those photos were always kind of seared in this emotional place in my heart. To be here, to bring her back here and to tell her story was quite beautiful.”
Mariska, 61, was just a toddler when her mother was killed in a car accident in Louisiana in 1967. Mariska and her older brothers, Zoltan and Mickey Jr, were in the backseat at the time and all three were injured. Mariska’s injuries left her with a noticeable scar on her face. Paramedics actually left the scene without realising the toddler was in the car and only returned to retrieve her after one of her brothers asked about her whereabouts.
During her short life, Jayne was branded as the perfect Hollywood blonde bombshell but behind the scenes she was a complicated woman who spoke several languages, was a classical pianist and violinist, who was very desperate to break out of the brand she had created for herself.
This is the side of her mother Mariska wanted to explore in the documentary.
“Seeing all this artistry and seeing that she never was able to do the kinds of films or make the kind of art that she wanted to was so intriguing,” she told Deadline. “I wanted to know that story and again, get to know the person. 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.”
Speaking to Vanity Fair before the documentary’s release, Mariska said she didn’t remember the accident and she doesn’t really remember her mother.
“I don’t remember the accident,” she told the publication. “I don’t even remember being told that my mother had died.”
“I look at photos, and I don’t really remember anything until I was five,” she added.
Mariska and her brothers were raised by their father, Mickey Hargitay, and she pieced together a picture of her mother from her movies, articles written about her and stories passed down from family and friends.
JAYNE MANSFIELD’S EARLY LIFE AND HOLLYWOOD CAREER
Jayne was born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 18, 1933. In an eerie coincidence, when Jayne was three years old, her father Herbert Palmer died of a heart attack while she was in the car with him.
Her mother Vera Palmer later remarried and they moved to Dallas.
By the time Jayne was 20, she had married, had a baby, and had began to take acting classes. In 1954, she moved to Los Angeles with her first child, Mariska’s sister Jayne Marie, and left her husband.
Determined to take on serious roles, she auditioned for a casting agent with a Joan of Arc monologue. Soon, a casting director told her to dye her hair blonde and wear tighter dresses if she wanted to get anywhere in Hollywood.
Adopting a Marilyn Monroe-esque breathy voice to the mix, Jayne soon started landing roles but she was never able to escape the typecast of the blonde bombshell. She went on to star in a bunch of films including The Girl Can’t Help It, The Wayward Bus and Promises! Promises! She also posed for playboy magazine and gained the nickname of “Hollywood’s smartest dumb blonde”,
In 1962, in an attempt to introduce America to the real Jayne, she played classical violin on Jack Paar’s late-night talk show, but Paar interrupted her and said, “Who cares? Kiss me!”
For years, Mariska hated the fact that her late mother allowed herself to be the butt of the joke.
“It all started with the voice,” she recalled to Vanity Fair. “When I would hear that fake voice, it used to just flip me out. I’d think, Why is she talking like that? That’s not real.”
Her father insisted it was just her mother’s public image but it would take Mariska years to discover the real woman behind the facade.
“My dad would always say, ‘She wasn’t like that at all. She was like you. She was funny and irreverent and fearless and real.’”
HOW MARISKA HARGITAY FOUND OUT ABOUT HER BIOLOGICAL FATHER
In 1956, Jayne spotted Mickey Hargitay, a Hungarian body builder and former Mr Universe, performing in Mae West’s Las Vegas revue. According to Hollywood legend, she told her friends “I’ll have a steak and the man on the left”.
The couple married in 1958 and remained together until her death in 1967.
Mariska was 25 years old when she discovered Mickey wasn’t actually her biological dad.
She had travelled to the house of Sabin Gray, a diehard fan of her late mother, to see his collection of memorabilia. At the end of her visit, Sabin asked her whether she wanted to see a photo of Italian singer Nelson Sardelli.
“It was a little overwhelming for me because there were life-size cutouts, and it was truly like a museum or a shrine to her,” Mariska explained recently on the Call Her Daddy podcast. “That was hard for me at that age to sort of understand… I’m seeing all this stuff that I had never seen and kind of grew up away from all of that.”
“He’s showing me all these photos. He’s showing me whatever it is, dresses that she had that he’d collected, earrings that she wore, things from movies from the movie set, props or whatever, and then he says to me, ‘Do you want to see a picture of Nelson?'” she recalled.
“I just looked at him, and this jolt went through my body, and I said, ‘Who’s Nelson?'” she said. “And then I knew in one second.”
The actress said Sabin panicked and turned white and told her “it’s probably not true”, before he showed her a photo of Nelson.
“On a cellular level, it was just like DNA talking to DNA,” she said. “I knew it was true, and I just really thought my life was over.”
“I remember leaving and driving to my brother’s house, and I thought I was going to crash my car because I was so not present,” she continued. “I was totally dissociated and out of my body, and I got to my brother’s house. I didn’t even know how I got there, but I knew that I shouldn’t be driving. It was crazy.”
Her brother, who she was very close to, also didn’t know the truth, so Mariska decided to confront Mickey.
“So I drive up to the house that he is building me and confront him, and he was like, ‘What? What are you talking about? Are you crazy? That’s so not true,'” she said.
“He kept saying, ‘You look like my father, you look exactly like my father, you’re a Hargitay to the end,'” she continued. “The irony is that I’m more like my dad than anyone in our whole family. Like, I am mini-Mickey, right? And so it was just a very extraordinarily painful moment. I say that this is the moment that I became an adult, and it’s so visceral for me because I was in so much pain, I was so overwhelmed.”
Mickey continued to deny that he wasn’t Mariska’s biological dad until his death in 2006.
Stream My Mom Jayne on HBO Max from 28 June 2025. Subscribe now.
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