My Mom Jayne (Sky Documentaries)
Jayne Mansfield was born into the wrong era. She wanted to be another Marilyn Monroe, when really she was a smarter, more talented prototype of Katie Price.
Most people, if they recognise her at all today, know Jayne only from a single photograph, as the blonde in the low-cut dress, under the withering sidelong gaze of a contemptuous Sophia Loren.
My Mom Jayne, a biographical portrait by her daughter Mariska Hargitay, with the help of her numerous half-siblings, was a reminder that, for a few years around 1960, the starlet was a mega-celebrity — bringing up her family in a pink Beverly Hills mansion with its own zoo and jungle in the grounds.
Today, there’s literally nothing left of her fame. Mariska’s two-hour film opened amid bulldozed rubble. The house, sold to pay Jayne’s debts after her death aged 34 in 1967, has been demolished. Even the heart-shaped swimming pool is gone.
Her second husband, Mickey, a Hungarian circus performer and bodybuilder, adored her. But she carved a trail of wreckage through the lives of everyone she loved, and the predominant mood of the recollections was not of celebration but of sadness, regret and loss.
Three of her children — including Mariska, who was fortunately too young to remember it — were in the back seat of Jayne’s car when she was killed in a head-on collision with a truck. Her latest boyfriend, the lawyer who handled her third divorce, died with her.
Mariska, herself a successful actress and star of the long-running Law And Order: Special Victims Unit crime serial, insisted she’d spent her life avoiding lurid gossip about her mother’s life. But Jayne was addicted to the lurid, revelling in it.
As a 21-year-old hopeful in Hollywood, she realised her dreams of serious acting were holding her back when she auditioned as Joan of Arc for the head of casting at Paramount Studios.
Most people, if they recognise her at all today, know Jayne Mansfield only from a single photograph, as the blonde in the low-cut dress, under the withering sidelong gaze of a contemptuous Sophia Loren
Jayne is pictured with her second husband Mickey Hargitay, her daughter Jayne Marie and her baby son Milkos in 1959, a few years before Mariska was born
Jayne’s movie roles were eclipsed by a whirlwind love life that included three failed marriages, the second of which brought her Mariska
Mariska Hargitay at the ‘My Mom Jayne: A Film By Mariska Hargitay’ premiere during the 2025 Tribeca Festival at Carnegie Hall last month in New York City
‘He just seemed to think that I was wasting my “obvious talents”,’ she giggled, and soon she was posing topless for Playboy.
Success did come, with a Broadway stage role and a couple of hit movies. But when her career hit the skids, she was willing to do anything to stay in the public eye — including nude scenes and seedy nightclub shows.
This two-hour biography didn’t attempt to analyse why Jayne so craved attention. Her father died when she was three, which helps to explain why she first married at 17, but patently she was trying to fill a deeper void.
In the final half-hour, the film took a shocking twist as Mariska revealed that Mickey Hargitay wasn’t her biological father. In fact, she was born after Jayne’s brief fling with a Vegas crooner, Nelson Sardelli.
Mariska confronted her mother’s former press secretary, 99-year-old Rusty Strait, implying he has exploited her memory. But surely Jayne wouldn’t have it any other way.
