My Mom Jayne (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

My Mom Jayne - A Film By Mariska Hargitay

MY MOM JAYNE (2025)

Featuring Mariska Hargitay, Mickey Hargitay Jr., Zoltan Hargitay, Jayne Marie Mansfield, Tony Cimber, Ellen Hargitay, Rusty Strait, Nelson Sardelli, Giovanna Sardelli, Pietra Sardelli, and archival footage of Jayne Mansfield, Mickey Hargitay, Sam Brody, Merv Griffin, Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Edward R. Murrow, Jack Paar and Vera J. Palmer.

Directed by Mariska Hargitay.

Distributed by HBO. 106 minutes. Rated TV-MA.

Jayne Mansfield doesn’t get much respect, nearly 60 years after her way-too-young death at only 34 in a tragic car accident. The dumb-blonde roles, the va-va-voom body, the baby doll voice, the bad choices in life and men – all of these things have sort of cemented Mansfield’s status in Hollywood as a second-rate Marilyn Monroe wannabe.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the image of Mansfield that has become the most iconic in Hollywood history is a photo of her sitting next to Italian sex symbol Sophia Loren at Romanoff’s restaurant in Los Angeles. In the photo, Loren is giving Mansfield the side eye as Jayne smiles for the camera with her cleavage just barely held into her low-cut dress.

While Mansfield did idolize Monroe, and she did want a similar level of success, there was a lot more to her than just the image and the body. (As there was with Monroe….) For example, Mansfield was actually extremely smart. She was classically trained on the piano and the violin. She was fluent in several languages. And she was down-to-earth in person, and a warm and caring mother.

Sadly, Mansfield grew up in an era of Hollywood that was a smirky boys’ club . In an attempt, re-shown here, to prove that she was more than just another dumb blonde, she brought a violin and wanted to demonstrate that she could play on the Jack Paar show. She had barely played a few notes when Paar rudely, lecherously interrupted, “Who cares? Kiss me.” The audience swelled with applause and Mansfield tried to put on a game face and perfunctorily did what was asked of her. But you can see in her eyes that Mansfield had dealt with this kind of disrespectful treatment from countless men over the course of her career, and of her life.

Mansfield actually wanted to be a serious actress, but she was a savvy self-promoter and willing to play the game in order to succeed in the movies. The blonde sexpot roles were almost the only roles she was offered – due to her obvious attributes – but only on very rare occasions was she offered a serious, thoughtful role.

She made herself very available – the old joke that “she would go to the opening of an envelope,” was coined about her, I believe. She would do Bob Hope USO shows, cabaret gigs in Vegas, pin-up photography, go-go shows, anything she could to get her star rising.

None of this was remembered by her daughter Mariska, who was one of the three surviving children in the car crash which killed her mother, her mother’s lawyer / boyfriend and the car’s chauffeur. Mariska Hargitay was only three-years-old when her mother died and has no real memories of her.

Therefore, due to a lack of personal connection, Hargitay was long uncomfortable with her mother because she only knew the popular culture perception – the willing sex bomb with the baby doll voice.

It is interesting, because Hargitay has found success in the show business world that her mother craved so much. Perhaps Hargitay never hit some of her mother’s few real highs, but she has had a much steadier and more successful career than her mother ever had. In fact, her defining role as Det. Olivia Benson on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit has now been going for an incredible 26 seasons, which is much longer than her mother’s entire career lasted.

Even her discomfort with her mother is a little pointed, because the first time I remember seeing Hargitay on television, as the best friend in a short-lived mid-90s Nancy McKeon sitcom called Can’t Hurry Love, Hargitay was playing a slightly ditzy sexpot. It was the type of role that her mom would have easily been able to pull off.

Hargitay grew up in a loving-but-apparently rather secretive family. Her father, former Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay, made sure that she and her siblings were well-cared for and loved, but their mother (and their mother’s life and death) was rarely discussed and still shrouded in mystery.

For years, Hargitay felt like an outsider from her family, although they never consciously tried to hold her at arm’s length. But she still noticed some odd things. For example, Jayne always insisted that the girl be called “Maria” even though the birth certificate gave her name as “Mariska.” Also, her mother, who was apparently a doting and loving mom, had baby books for all of her siblings which were bursting with material, but Mariska’s was mostly empty.

In her 60s, long after her mother was gone, Hargitay was finally ready to try to come to terms with who her famous mother was. In a way, she turns into a detective like her most famous role; tracking down the evidence of who and what her mother was. She goes through a storage vault of Jayne’s life and show-biz memorabilia which hadn’t been opened since 1969. She watched the movies and performances and read the press and the books – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

More importantly she filmed talks with her older siblings, who remember more of their mother than she does. After all of these years, these are surprisingly heartfelt, although her half-brother acknowledges he is not sure whether it is good for him to know certain secrets about the past that cannot be changed now.

She also comes clean on the other major secret of her life – that in her 20s, an obsessive fan and collector of her mother’s memorabilia, assuming she was already aware, let her know that there were rumors that Mickey Hargitay was not her biological father. The real father, it turns out, was an Italian singer named Nelson Sardelli, whom her mother met in Europe while she and Mickey were separated and with whom she had a short, passionate-but-tempestuous relationship which led to Mariska. Jayne returned to Mickey when she found out she was pregnant and the relationship with Nelson came to a very sudden halt.

Hargitay met Sardelli soon after in Atlantic City, and she has maintained a friendship with him for years. However, she kept it a secret in respect of Hargitay, who was a very good father to her in all ways other than biology. Sardelli (and his two daughters, Mariska’s half-sisters) speak extensively about what happened (Sardelli seems appropriately rueful about his part in everything) and how his girls found out they had a sister even before Mariska and Nelson connected.

It seems, despite this murky history, the extended family of Jayne Mansfield has thrived and survived its secrets. In fact, through the making of this film, they seem to have gotten some closure from past hurts, and in the end, they all seem to be happy to have gone on this voyage. Particularly Mariska Hargitay, who has found a new understanding of and empathy for what her mother experienced in her short life.

Knowing that this is a very personal story to her, Hargitay has leaned into the privacy of the situation. My Mom Jayne will never be called a neutral documentary look at a situation – it is obviously something that is very heartfelt to the participants, and particularly the star in front of and behind the camera. However, despite the title, My Mom Jayne is not just the story of Jayne Mansfield, it is the tale of all of these people.

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: June 28, 2025.