NEED TO KNOW
For Mariska Hargitay, creating My Mom Jayne served as a way for her to get to know her late mother in an entirely new light.
When Hargitay was just 3 years old, she lost her mom, Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield, in a car wreck. Fifty-eight years later, Hargitay, now 61, is making her feature film directorial debut with a documentary all about Mansfield, out June 27 on HBO and Max.
As the Law & Order: SVU actress excavated her past, she was forced to reconcile with her mother’s status as a sex symbol, which included a put-on, breathy voice Mansfield often used in public.
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“I had a very complicated relationship with her, and I think I was angry that I didn’t know the person behind the pose, if you will. I felt like there was this person, and you know, what was that voice?” Hargitay said during an appearance on the Today show on June 26. “We want our moms to be normal. I wanted my mom to be June Cleaver, right? I wanted just a regular mom that baked cookies and put notes in my lunch bag, and instead I had this mom that walked around in a bikini and heels. Like, what is that? And why are you talking like that?”
As she got older, Hargitay said, she was able to better understand the complexities of her mother, and she really “wanted to get to know the other parts” of Mansfield, beyond what the public understood.
“I remember seeing a candid photo of her that just made me go, ‘I see this other part of you. I want to know her! Instead of the pose and the sex symbol and that voice that drove me nuts because I’m like, ‘That’s not your real voice!'” Hargitay explained. “I don’t wanna know about your measurements, I wanna know about what made your heart sing, what made you laugh, what made you cry, what was touching to you, what pain did you carry? So, it was an extraordinary journey.”
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The film is full of archival footage of Mansfield, which Hargitay said was and is “the dream” of any filmmaker, and the videos allowed her to hear and get to know her mother’s true voice.
“Because the voice was a thing for me, to hear her, her real voice, when she dropped down in that register, I went [gasps] ‘There you are. There you are!'” she said, adding that the plethora of old footage was “such a gift.”
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When asked why now was the right time for her to tell this story, Hargitay didn’t miss a beat.
“I was ready,” she told Today’s Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin. “It wasn’t doing anybody any good to keep it a secret.”
My Mom Jayne will be available to stream on June 27 on HBO and Max.
