Mariska Hargitay Is Choosing to Heal
Mariska Hargitay Is Choosing to Heal
Shannon CarlinThu, February 26, 2026 at 12:35 PM UTC
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Mariska Hargitay Credit - Victoria Will
Last year, veteran actor and advocate Mariska Hargitay—known to millions as the fearless Captain Olivia Benson, whom she’s portrayed on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, for nearly three decades—stepped into a new role: documentary filmmaker.
With her feature-film directorial debut, My Mom Jayne, Hargitay examined the life, career, and complicated legacy of her mother, 1950s and ’60s Hollywood starlet Jayne Mansfield, who died in a 1967 car accident at 34, when Hargitay was just 3½ years old. “I wanted to make a movie that recognized the whole person without judgment,” she says.
For most of her life, Hargitay, 62, felt conflicted about her mom’s movie persona. Mansfield, touted as a sex symbol, often played the “dumb blonde” onscreen, earning comparisons to Marilyn Monroe in films like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Girl Can’t Help It, which won her a Golden Globe. But, in real life, the mother of five was also a classically trained violinist and pianist who spoke five languages.
“I think as kids, my siblings were confused, like, ‘Wait, you’re not like that at home. Why are you acting like that?’” she says. “But I don’t remember enough of those times, so I was just yearning to know my mom my whole life.” Making the documentary gave her a chance to see Mansfield as the “multidimensional woman that she was” and contemplate all their similarities. “Her tenacity, her determination,” Hargitay says. “I am so grateful that I got that from her.”
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As much as My Mom Jayne is Hargitay’s love letter to her mother, it was also a journey to self-discovery. In the film, she reveals that the man who raised her, Mansfield’s second husband, Hungarian-born bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, was not her biological father—singer and entertainer Nelson Sardelli was. It was a secret she had been keeping for more than 30 years.
“Even as a child, I knew something was up. I didn’t know what, but I knew there was something,” Hargitay explains. At 25, she was devastated to find out about Sardelli, and remembers “feeling like I was going to spontaneously combust and feeling like I was the only person in the world with this story.” But she has since become close with him and his two daughters. She only kept their relationship a secret, she says, to protect Mickey, who died in 2006. “He really was my North Star,” she says. Since the film’s release, she has received letters from people with similar experiences. Sharing this part of her family’s story, she says, “was a way to invite people to look at their own families and what possibility and love can come out of the truth.”
It’s not the only time she has experienced the power of sharing her personal story, and how doing so can forge meaningful bonds. For nearly half of her life, Hargitay has been a fierce ally of survivors of sexual assault, domestic abuse, and child abuse. She started the Joyful Heart Foundation in 2004 to help survivors find justice and healing through legislation reform, education, advocacy, and community building—inspired, in part, by her work on Law and Order. The foundation has steered efforts to address the backlog of untested rape kits, and awards grants to support professionals who work with survivors. In 2025, it also helped pass the Take It Down Act, a federal law designed to combat the publication of nonconsensual intimate images online, including AI-generated deepfakes. She calls efforts to pass the act some of the work she’s been most proud of.
In 2024, Hargitay wrote an essay for People where she revealed she too is a survivor of sexual assault. It was the first time Hargitay had felt comfortable identifying herself as a rape survivor. “I think the short answer is I was ready,” she says. “It didn’t have power over me anymore.”
The support she received, especially from fellow survivors, was a reminder that her vulnerability has always been her superpower. “I do not see it as a weakness. Never have,” she says. “I see it as a connector, stitching in humanity.” That need for connection drives her as an artist. “I want to make movies that heal and show our capacity to do so,” she says. “That’s what My Mom Jayne was, a movie about healing.”
Contact us at letters@time.com.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
