‘My Mom Jayne': Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay crafts a moving tribute to her mother

Irish Independent

14-07-2025

Mariska and her older brothers, Zoltan and Mickey, were in the back of the car. The children were uninjured, but the driver and Mansfield's then boyfriend, the physically abusive Sam Brody, also died.
Hargitay was almost left behind by rescuers, until Zoltan asked where she was on the way to the hospital. They returned to the scene and found her lodged under a seat.
She was so young when Mansfield died that she has no vivid memories of her mother. 'It was like this little hole in my heart,' she says in the excellent My Mom Jayne (Sky Documentaries, Saturday, July 12; available on catch-up), a highly personal film that marks her debut as a documentary director.
The Jayne Mansfield she knew when she was growing up is the one the world at large knew: the buxom, dumb-blonde sex kitten with the squeaky little-girl voice, which was a put-on.
As she grew up, Hargitay recoiled from the image. 'I kind of looked the other way when I heard the public voice,' she says, 'because I knew she was really, really smart'.
Mansfield spoke French, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian. She was classically trained in violin. Her teachers considered her good enough to play Carnegie Hall one day.
What Mansfield wanted most was to be a serious actor. But in the Hollywood of the 1950s and 1960s, the ditzy, sexy blonde was a more saleable commodity to both the public and the sexist creeps who ran the system.
As far as Mansfield was concerned, the sex symbol persona was only ever a tool to leverage her into a position where she could fulfil her ambitions. Instead, it boxed her in and suffocated those ambitions.
By the end of her life and career, she'd been reduced to performing in nightclubs and appearing in a few tacky, third-rate movies.
It's hard watching the clips of the many appalling indignities she had to put up with, even at the peak of her fame. There she is playing the dumb, man-hungry blonde while entertaining the troops with the odious Bob Hope.
There's another clip of the repugnant Mickey Rooney ogling her breasts. Worst of all is an appearance on The Jack Paar Show. Parr, who preceded Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show, invites her to play the violin.
She begins to play, only for Paar to rudely cut her off. 'Who cares, kiss me!' he says. The audience laughs and she smiles through gritted teeth.
My Mom Jayne is Hargitay's attempt to connect with the mother she never properly knew. and to understand why she took on the demeaning persona. She takes a refreshingly unusual approach by sitting down for intimate conversations with her brothers and her mother's daughter from her first marriage, Jayne Marie. It's telling that the two women refer to one another throughout as 'sisters' rather than 'half-sisters'.
After Mansfield's death, Hargitay and her brothers were raised by their father, the Hungarian-born actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, who was Mansfield's second husband, and his wife Ellen, who became a loving stepmother to them.
Mickey, who died in 2006, was by some measure the best thing to ever happen to Jayne. If Hargitay's memories of her mother are fleeting and opaque, there's no doubt about her feelings for Mickey. He was a lovely man and a wonderful father. She adored him, and he adored her and his other children.
But despite having as happy an upbringing as possible given the loss of her mother, Hargitay always felt there was something missing.
This nagging feeling was exacerbated when her grandmother cryptically told her in her teens: 'I'm all you have.'
When she was 25, Hargitay discovered, quite by accident, that her biological father wasn't Mickey Hargitay, but singer Nelson Sardelli, who's 90 now.
Life as I knew it was irrevocably changed
She was conceived during one of Mickey and Jayne's several splits before their divorce in 1964. 'The bottom dropped out of everything,' she says. 'Life as I knew it was irrevocably changed.'
How she coped with that change makes for an exceptionally moving story of forgiveness, reconciliation, understanding, healing and in the end, the strength of family, both immediate and extended. It's a lovely film.