‘My Mom Jayne’: Mariska Hargitay Reclaims Her Own Story in New Doc
“I’m reclaiming my own story; this is what this is about for me,” explains the Emmy and Golden Globe winning Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay in My Mom Jayne, her new intimate and moving documentary about her mother Jayne Manfield, one of the 1950s and ‘60s “Blonde Bombshells” who followed the emergence of Marilyn Monroe, and her life’s effect on Mariska and her family.
While promoting her well-received film, Mariska shared a shocking secret that few know, one she held close for 30 +years — her biological father was not Mickey Hargitay, the loving Hungarian immigrant weightlifter and sometime actor who raised her (along with three of her half-siblings), but one of Manfield’s paramours, a genial Brazilian-born entertainer named Nelson Sardelli.
Mariska dives deep to tell a comprehensive story about her mother, whose tumultuous life ended at 34 in a 1967 car crash that also killed the driver and her abusive boyfriend/agent. Three-year-old Mariska was injured along with her two older half-brothers as they sat in the backseat. (Mansfield had five children with three husbands and Sardelli.)
“I don’t really have any memories of my mom,” the actress notes in the doc. ‘But I began to experience a sense of shame seeing my mother as a sex symbol.” The “most photographed woman in show business,” as Edward R. Murrow once dubbed her, however, was “no dumb blond.” She spoke a number of languages, played the violin and piano, and showed off her comedy chops in the popular show and movie, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? However, though she yearned to be a serious actress, her va-va voom looks betrayed her and kept her mostly playing in sex farces and melodramas. In later years, she pulled off numerous publicity stunts to stay in the limelight and played in nightclubs around the country.
“I never talked to Mickey, who was my rock, or my siblings much about our mother, but I want to understand her now,” Mariska Hargitay shares in My Mom Jayne. “Not as the sex symbol, but as my mom. It’s a part of my life that always felt locked away. But now she feels so alive to me.”
Some of the more touching scenes in the doc include Mariska’s interviews with her siblings, who describe Jayne as “loving, smart and funny” and with a tearful Sardelli and his two other surviving daughters, and finally opening a long-abandoned storage unit filled with masses of family photos and home movies, press clippings, fan missives, and Jayne’s personal letters. She also found Jayne Mansfield‘s 1956 Golden Globe Award for her role in the comedy The Girl Can’t Help It, matching the one Mariska Hargitay won in 2006 for SVU.
My Mom Jayne, Documentary Premiere, Friday, June 27, 8/7c, HBO and HBO Max
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