At age 3, a wounded Mariska Hargitay was practically deserted on the scene of the automotive crash that killed her well-known mom, Jayne Mansfield, a brand new documentary reveals.
In “My Mom Jayne,” Hargitay’s private challenge that had its US premiere Friday at Carnegie Corridor as a part of the Tribeca Pageant, the “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” star, 61, sheds new mild on the tragic evening of June 29, 1967.
“I often think about why she didn’t just sit in the back seat with us,” Hargitay’s brother Zoltan Hargitay says of their late mom within the doc.
Mansfield, the 34-year-old Hollywood star of the 1957 film “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,” was touring from Biloxi, Mississippi, the place she had been acting at a membership, to New Orleans.
Additionally within the Buick Electra had been driver Ronald Harrison, Mansfield’s boyfriend and lawyer Samuel Brody and her three youngsters with ex-husband Mickey Hargitay: 3-year-old Mariska (then nicknamed Maria), 6-year-old Zoltan and 8-year-old Mickey Jr.
The adults had been seated up entrance, whereas the youngsters had been asleep within the again.
As they had been driving on US Route 90, the Buick slammed into the again of a trailer truck, killing Mansfield, Brody and Harrison. The three younger siblings had been injured and unconscious.
After the survivors had been picked up by authorities and had been being pushed away to the hospital, Zoltan cracked open his eyes.
“Where’s Maria?” the boy mentioned of his little sister.
Mariska wasn’t there.
The toddler was so small that officers at first didn’t see her within the wreckage, they usually left the positioning with out her.
“You were lodged underneath the passenger seat with a head injury,” Mariska’s stepmother Ellen Hargitay tells her within the movie.
“Thank God Zoli woke up.”
In “My Mom Jayne,” Hargitay explores the lifetime of Mansfield, who’s usually solely remembered as a glamorous bombshell. The Emmy Award winner additionally opens up about her long-held secret: that her organic father shouldn’t be Mickey Hargitay, however 90-year-old Brazilian-Italian entertainer Nelson Sardelli.
“I just wanted to find out what happened, and what happened is so meaningful,” Mariska mentioned onstage at Carnegie Corridor Friday of studying extra about her mom’s previous with Sardelli.
“Was it hard? Yeah. Has it been an incredibly bumpy road? Yes! And guess what? It’s f–king glorious now.”
“My Mom Jayne” streams on Max beginning June 27.
