Mariska Hargitay experienced a scary incident nearly three decades ago and opened up about how it parallels her mother Jayne Mansfield’s death.
“I was involved in a serious motorcycle accident when I was 34,” the Law & Order star, 61, said in an interview with The Shift published on Friday, July 25. “[That] is how old my mother was when she died. The experience was deeply painful on every level.”
Hargitay shared that following the accident, “something opened up” for her, which led her to where she is now.
“It was like I’d crossed a threshold. My trajectory was my own, my story was my own, without a predetermined ending. Within a year, I got the role of Olivia Benson on SVU,” she continued. “I can’t help but make a connection between that moment of liberation after the accident from what I feared was my fate and then stepping into this role that has become such a profound part of my life. It’s like I stepped out of a narrative that wasn’t mine and into my own story.”
In June 1967, Mansfield died in a car accident at age 34. Mansfield was traveling with three of her kids, Mariska, Zoltan Hargitay and Mickey Hargitay Jr., to New Orleans from Mississippi. (Mansfield was also mother to daughter Jayne Marie Mansfield, whom she welcomed with her first husband and son Antonio “Tony” Cimber from her third marriage.)
The family was also joined by her attorney and partner, Sam Brody, and their 19-year-old driver. The vehicle rear-ended a tractor trailer, killing the three adults in the car.
The actress was 3 years old at the time and has no recollection of the incident.
“I don’t remember the accident,” she told Vanity Fair in May. “I don’t even remember being told that my mother had died. I look at photos, and I don’t really remember anything until I was 5.”
Earlier this year, Mariska opened up about her memories with her mother and explored them in a documentary titled My Mom Jayne. The doc also examines Jayne’s public persona as an actress and sex symbol in the 1960s, plus her private life with her family.
“I’ve spent my whole life distancing myself from my mother,” Mariska said in the trailer for the HBO Max documentary. “But I want to understand her now … I want to know her as Jayne. My mom, Jayne.”
Mariska later revealed that while she was working on the project, she got to see how alike she and her mom truly were.
“During the making of this film and on this journey, I’ve had so many moments where I got to see our similarity, or what I came from, and what I admire and revere and respect are the things about her that I’m in awe of and the things about her that are so similar to how I am,” she recalled on “Call Her Daddy.” “So, in that way, it has been this gift. It’s so magnificent.”
Mariska added that she used to “struggle” with “decisions” her mom made in the past, but after getting to connect with her on a deeper level, it “reframed” her mindset.
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