Mariska Hargitay is sharing details of a special moment she shared with her biological father, Nelson Sardelli.
According to People, the actress revealed at a screening of My Mom Jayne, at the HamptonsFilm’s SummerDocs series on Thursday, July 17, that she spent Father’s Day this year with Sardelli, 90, and he apologized to her.
“It was so magical,” Hargitay, 61, said. “He apologized and he said, ‘Thank you for forgiving me.’ And I said, ‘Thank you for making the choice that you made.’”
The Law & Order: SVU star added, “So it’s like everyone was right in the end, but I grew up not knowing that.”
Hargitay, who is the daughter of the late Jayne Mansfield, discovered that Sardelli was her biological father — rather than Mickey Hargitay who raised her — when she was around 25. The revelations were made public in the documentary about her mother.
Appearing on an episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast in June, Hargitay was candid about what happened when she first discovered that the man she believed to be her father was not her biological dad.
“I went up to my dad’s house and I was hysterically crying and in a state and he was — how about this metaphor, my dad was physically building me a house. So, I drive up to the house that he is building me and confront him,” she recalled of the emotional conversation with Mickey. “He was like, ‘What are you talking about? Are you crazy? That’s so not true.’”
During the conversation, Mickey insisted his daughter was “a Hargitay to the end,” due to her looks despite the information she had uncovered. (Mickey raised Mariska and her two siblings — Mickey Jr., born 1958, and Zoltán, born 1960 — after her mom’s June 1967 death.)
“The irony is that I’m more like my dad than anyone in our whole family. I am mini-Mickey, so it was just a very extraordinarily painful moment,” she added. “I say that this is the moment that I became an adult and it’s so visceral for me because I was in so much pain. I was so overwhelmed.”
The actress explained that she changed her approach after realizing the experience was equally painful for Mickey, who died in 2006.
“It doesn’t matter what I feel, I love him … and we’re done here, we’re done here,” she said. “I pretended that I believed him, and we never spoke of it again.”
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