While Mariska Hargitay‘s documentary on her movie star mother Jayne Mansfield, “My Mom Jayne” — who died in a car accident when Hargitay was only three years old — just dropped on HBO Max June 27, the “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” actress said that she’s been “preparing for this [her] whole life.”
“Even when I was in, like [my] early, early twenties, and my acting teacher, Larry Moss — who’s brilliant man — in the class, said, ‘We all have a story.’ And one of the exercises in the class was to do it was like a one man show — where you would write your story and then perform it in class,” Hargitay shared on “The View.” “And I saw such brilliant stories. Now, I never did it back in my twenties for good reason… but the fact that I was able to do it now is everything.”
Related Stories
“My Mom Jayne” includes a number of revelations about both Mansfield and Hargitay, including that Mickey Hargitay — the Hungarian-born bodybuilder known for his starring role in “The Loves of Hercules” — was not her biological father. Instead, it was Brazilian-Italian singer Nelson Sardelli, with whom Mansfield had an affair while she was obtaining a divorce from Mickey.
“I still can’t believe that the story has never come out,” Hargitay told Entertainment Weekly. “And I still believe that somehow my story was divinely protected, so that I got to tell it on my timing.”
The actress — who has played the non-nonsense Captain Olivia Benson on “SVU” since the series began in 1999 — said that her career, in many ways, has been an “unconscious rebellion” against the stereotypical role her blonde bombshell mother was boxed into. Mansfield’s career began in the wake of Marylin Monroe’s superstardom, and both performers were under contract to 20th Century Fox.
“My father [Mickey Hargitay]… always told me, ‘Nobody defines you. You decide. They don’t tell you who you are. You tell them.’ And that is something that I really impart to my kids, and I want everyone to know that, especially every small child… is that so many times we end up the way we’re reflected by our parents,” Hargitay explained to “The View” co-hosts. “He empowered me, and so when I was young, because I think he saw how [Mansfield] listened, maybe to the wrong people, and how, of course, he saw how people put her in a box… because she was… a girl from Texas and didn’t know better. She wanted to be an actress. And that’s what she was her whole life. That’s what she dreamed of being. And they turned her into this… limited sex symbol, and said, ‘That’s what you are.’”
Ultimately, Hargitay said she viewed her documentary as a “family story.”
“You would think… it’s a story about a Hollywood icon and living in the ‘50s, and you’d think it’s such a specific story. But… what I hope this movie provides is that out of the personal comes the universal,” Hargitay said. “And so even though it’s my mother’s story, and then it segues into my story, it’s really a family story… My hope is that everybody sees themselves.”
