The actress — daughter of the late Jayne Mansfield — reveals her father was not really Mickey Hargitay and recollects the second she confronted her organic dad, saying, “I went full Olivia Benson on him.”
In her new documentary, My Mother Jayne, Mariska Hargitay reveals a fairly enormous household secret — that the person she thought was her organic father, Mickey Hargitay, wasn’t.
The Legislation & Order: SVU star’s mom Jayne Mansfield was married to Hargitay from 1958 to 1964, however had a romance with Italian entertainer Nelson Sardelli in 1963 — after submitting for divorce. She gave beginning to Mariska shortly afterwards, whereas Mickey was at all times the person recognized as her father.
That, nonetheless, wasn’t true — one thing Mariska, now 61, discovered when she was in her 20s.
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“He was my all the things, my idol. He liked me a lot, and I knew it,” she instructed Vainness Truthful about Mickey, including that she additionally “knew one thing else — I simply did not know what I knew.”
When she noticed a photograph of Sardelli in her 20s, she realized that that “one thing else” was — he was her bio dad.
“It was like the ground fell out from beneath me. Like my infrastructure dissolved,” Vainness Truthful stories she says within the doc. The publication notes the actress did confront Mickey about it on the time, however he denied it. Her mom, after all, died in a automotive crash when Mariska was simply three, with all three of Mansfield’s kids — who all survived — within the backseat of the automobile on the time.
She solely actually discovered the reality when she went to see Sardelli carry out in Atlantic Metropolis when she was 30, saying he burst into tears when she launched herself to him.
“I have been ready 30 years for this second,” she instructed Vainness Truthful he mentioned to her — with Hargitay saying she “went full Olivia Benson on him” within the second.
“I used to be like, ‘I do not need something, I do not want something from you … I’ve a dad,'” she continued. “There was one thing about loyalty. I wished to be loyal to Mickey.”
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The revelation, she mentioned, left her feeling like she had been “residing a lie my total life.”
Over time, nonetheless, she, Sardelli and her two half-sisters got here to type a bond of their very own, with Hargitay saying the ladies “wept and wept and wept” after seeing the documentary. “These two ladies that I really like a lot — I made them secrets and techniques! It is so heartbreaking to me,” shared Hargitay, recalling how she used to introduce them to others as “household associates.”
“I grew up the place I used to be alleged to, and I do know that everybody made your best option for me,” Hargitay believes now. “I am Mickey Hargitay’s daughter — that isn’t a lie. This documentary is sort of a love letter to him, as a result of there is no one which I used to be nearer to on this planet.”
Mickey handed away in 2006. Sardelli, in the meantime, continues to be alive, in his 90s and residing in Las Vegas.
