Mariska Hargitay's Big Career Update She's Been Teasing for Months Is About Her Mom
Mariska Hargitay's mom is the late, great Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield.
In October, Mariska Hargitay teased that a "big, big" announcement was coming in 2025, and now we know the news: She's making a documentary about her mother, the late Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield.
Titled My Mom Jayne, the documentary follows Hargitay “as she seeks to know, understand, and embrace her mother for the first time,” according to the logline (per The Hollywood Reporter).
“Through intimate interviews and a collection of never-before-seen photos and home movies, [Hargitay] grapples with her mother’s public and private legacy and discovers the layers and depth of who Jayne was, not only to her audience but to those who were closest to her," the description continues.
“This movie is a labor of love and longing," Hargitay said in a statement. "It’s a search for the mother I never knew, an integration of a part of myself I’d never owned, and a reclaiming of my mother’s story and my own truth. I’ve always believed there is strength in vulnerability, and the process of making this film has confirmed that belief like never before.”
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Mariska Hargitay's mom is Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield
Jayne Mansfield was a bombshell Hollywood sex symbol in the '50s and '60s. Her father is bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, who passed away in September 2006. Mansfield died in a 1967 car accident. Hargitay was 3 years old at the time and in the car during the accident, as were her two older siblings, but they all survived.
Hargitay spoke to Glamour in 2021 about how losing her mother at such a young age affected her.
“I think I learned about crisis very young, and I learned very young that shit happens and there’s no guarantees, and we keep going. And then we transform it,” she said. “That’s been kind of my superpower, and the gift of having trauma early in life. I’ve spent the last 50—how old am I?—57, so 54 years sort of trying to figure out what happened and why, and what am I supposed to do with it?”
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“My mother was this amazing, beautiful, glamorous sex symbol — but people didn’t know that she played the violin and had a 160 IQ and had five kids and loved dogs,” Hargitay told People. “She was just so ahead of her time. She was an inspiration, she had this appetite for life, and I think I share that with her.”
