Three-year-old Mariska Hargitay was asleep in the back seat of a car when it rammed into a truck. The toddler survived, her limp little body lodged underneath the passenger seat. But her mother, Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield, died instantly. “I don’t remember the accident. I don’t even remember being told that my mother had died,” Hargitay tells me nearly 58 years after the crash. She is sitting in her New York City apartment, staring into the black hole where her early memories should be. “I look at photos, and I don’t really remember anything until I was five.”
In therapy, Hargitay used to fall asleep anytime she wandered too close to painful events—“like a narcoleptic!” She blamed that on her long hours playing Law and Order: SVU’s Captain Olivia Benson, work she juggles with her personal life as a mother of three. Eventually, Hargitay’s therapist suggested that her sleepiness might be a powerful defense mechanism against trauma. In order to dismantle it, she’d finally have to process the shame she felt about her sex symbol mother and let go of the dark secret about her paternity that she’d been guarding for decades. (Don’t worry, we’ll come to that shortly.) And so, during the depths of the pandemic, Hargitay began transforming her personal Pandora’s box into My Mom Jayne—an emotional documentary that premieres May 17 at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and will air Friday, June 27 on HBO and HBO Max.
My Mom Jayne is Hargitay’s debut as a documentary director, a film she initially saw as an archeological dig into Mansfield’s life. Dubbed “Broadway’s smartest dumb blonde” by Life magazine, Mansfield (born Vera Jayne Palmer) was an accomplished young woman who spoke several languages and played violin and piano. But like Hargitay, she’d experienced loss at a young age: Three-year-old Mansfield was in a car with her father when he died of a heart attack. By the time she was 20 she’d gotten married, had a baby, and begun to study acting in college. She moved to Los Angeles with her first child, Mariska’s sister Jayne Marie, in 1954, and soon ditched her husband.
Mansfield auditioned for a casting agent with a Joan of Arc monologue, vying for serious roles. Then a casting director suggested she try bleaching her hair and wearing tighter dresses. She took that advice and added a breathy, Marilyn Monroe–style voice to the mix. Her hope was that once she got her foot in the door, she’d break out of pinup prison. But even after a starring role in the Broadway hit Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, its film adaptation, and several more big movies, Mansfield struggled to get anyone to see past her breasts. In 1962, she played classical violin on Jack Paar’s late-night talk show, attempting to introduce America to the real Jayne Mansfield—but Paar interrupted her mid-note and shouted crudely, “Who cares? Kiss me!” The next year, she starred in Promises! Promises! A mainstream sex comedy, it featured Mansfield in various degrees of nudity and was banned in several American cities. By the time she died in 1967, she had become the floating signifier for a 1950s bombshell—famous mostly for being photographed.
Hargitay grew up mortified by this image of her lost mother: a blonde bimbo, the butt of everyone’s joke. “It all started with the voice,” she remembers. “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, Mickey Hargitay—a Hungarian bodybuilding champion turned actor who married Mansfield in 1956 and raised their three children after she died—would insist that this was just her public image. “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.’” But for Hargitay, educated in Los Angeles Catholic schools, it was hard to swallow. “I just wanted my mom to be like the other moms! Like, Why are you always in a bathing suit? Why so much breast? I just wanted a maternal mother image,” she says, burying her head in her hands. “I was embarrassed by the choices that she made.” When I mention the famous photo of Sophia Loren glancing sidelong at Mansfield’s exposed bosom, Hargitay’s face crumples. “That was a rough one. To see another woman look at your mom like that was excruciating for me as a little girl.”
All of this trickled down into Hargitay’s own sense of self. She played sports in high school, leaning toward a tomboyish aesthetic. “I didn’t want to be that girl, and I was judgmental about it. That’s the honest answer,” she says. “I definitely think that it informed some of my choices. What kind of actor am I going to be? I am going to be a different kind.” It’s probably not an accident that she’s spent 26 years inside the character of Olivia Benson, one of the fiercest, most nurturing female characters on television. “I’ve had so much strife and turmoil with this word mother—and here I was, this iconic mother figure in the culture. Isn’t that ironic?”
Though Hargitay had mommy problems growing up, her late father, Mickey, was beyond reproach. “He was my everything, my idol. He loved me so much, and I knew it,” she says, her voice wavering. “I also knew something else—I just didn’t know what I knew.”
Hargitay had always felt that she was different from her siblings, but it wasn’t until her 20s that she understood why.
In 1963, Mansfield filed for divorce from Mickey and began a well-publicized romance with an Italian entertainer named Nelson Sardelli—only to reconcile with Mickey several months before Hargitay’s birth in 1964. In her 20s, someone showed Hargitay a photo of Sardelli. She immediately knew in her bones that he was her biological father. “It was like the floor fell out from underneath me,” she recalls in My Mom Jayne. “Like my infrastructure dissolved.” But when she confronted Mickey, he denied it. The encounter was so shattering that she swept the skeleton back under the family rug and never mentioned Sardelli to Mickey again. (Mickey died in 2006.)
When she was 30, Hargitay went to see Sardelli perform in Atlantic City and introduced herself. He burst into tears—telling her, “I’ve been waiting 30 years for this moment.” It wasn’t a fairy-tale scene for Hargitay, though. “I went full Olivia Benson on him,” she tells me, switching into an icily aggressive voice. “I was like, ‘I don’t want anything, I don’t need anything from you.… I have a dad.’” She pauses dramatically. “There was something about loyalty. I wanted to be loyal to Mickey.”
In the aftermath, Hargitay struggled to navigate the internal gymnastics of “knowing I’m living a lie my entire life.” Is this why she’d always felt so comfortable on family trips to Rome, accompanying Mickey while he acted in spaghetti Westerns? Was she Hungarian or Italian? A wanted child or an “illegitimate” mistake?
Hargitay gradually forged a bond with Sardelli and his daughters and came to a realization: Her mother had returned to Mickey because she knew he would love and provide a stable home for baby Mariska. “I grew up where I was supposed to, and I do know that everyone made the best choice for me,” she says. “I’m Mickey Hargitay’s daughter—that is not a lie.” Her eyes fill with tears. “This documentary is kind of a love letter to him, because there’s no one that I was closer to on this planet.” Hargitay points out that two of her own children are adopted: “They are my kids. Now I understand so much, and, boy, is it sweet.”
Getting loved ones to understand why she needed to make the documentary wasn’t easy. “So many people were really hesitant for me to do it,” Hargitay says. But in time, both families gave her their blessing and agreed to appear in the film as well. Sardelli went first, making himself vulnerable on camera. Childhood pain and confusion are palpable in her interviews with her Hargitay siblings: Jayne Marie, Zoltan, and Mickey Jr. Watching the finished doc with them in a Los Angeles screening room was a cathartic experience. “Memory fragments you in so many ways, so to see the story organized felt like, “Oh, now we can deal with that,’” Hargitay says. The four of them sat, arms linked, throughout the film.
A separate private screening for her Sardelli sisters in Las Vegas felt equally profound. “They just wept and wept and wept,” Hargitay recalls, then begins to cry herself. “These two women that I love so much—I made them secrets! It’s so heartbreaking to me.” She remembers the countless times she introduced them to people as “family friends,” then guiltily looked away. “I’m not good with lies. So I also made this movie to unburden all of us.”
Hargitay sees a link between the familial silence-breaking of My Mom Jayne and her work with her Joyful Heart Foundation, a nonprofit for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse. In 2017 she produced I Am Evidence, a documentary about thousands of unprocessed rape kits languishing in America’s police lockers. Last year, she revealed that she had been raped by a friend during her 30s. “That was my own parallel journey with shame and not wanting to carry that anymore,” she says, “wanting for so long to be free of [the secret].”
I Am Evidence (directed by Trish Adlesic, who also coproduced My Mom Jayne, and Geeta Gandbhir) made Hargitay fall in love with filmmaking, and she plans to make more documentaries. “That’s one of the things I’m carving out in my future at SVU, making sure that I can have the balance.” When I ask about the fate of television’s longest-running character, she clutches her heart. “I’m not done with Olivia Benson yet,” she replies. “She’s got more work to do.”
For now, though, Hargitay is preparing herself for My Mom Jayne’s premiere at Cannes. Mansfield appeared at the festival in 1958, leaving behind a trail of glamorous photos. There’s Mansfield posing in a bikini with a chihuahua; Mansfield waving from the airplane steps; Mansfield in a gown facing a wall of photographers—always smiling, always in character as Jayne Mansfield, bombshell. “The fact that I get to take her back and to tell her story there, I just don’t have the words,” Hargitay tells me, vibrating with nervous excitement. As we finish our conversation, she thinks about everything it took to get her to this point. “Thirty years, and now it’s coming out.… It’s wild.” She beams so hard, I worry that her cheeks might explode. “I feel like I’m seven!”
HAIR, DENNIS LANNI; MAKEUP, DEANNA HAGAN; MANICURE, KAYO HIGUCHI; TAILOR, KATY PATEL; SET DESIGNER, ISAIAH WEISS. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY BIRDHOUSE. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.
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The post Mariska Hargitay Was “Living a Lie” for 30 Years. Now She’s Embracing Her Mother, Jayne Mansfield—and Her Biological Father appeared first on Vanity Fair.
