Mariska Hargitay has dropped a bombshell family secret in her new film My Mom Jayne at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Law and Order actress and daughter of the late Hollywood sex symbol Jayne Mansfield revealed a secret she has been sitting on for decades.
In her directorial debut, she shared with audiences for the first time that her biological father was not in fact Mickey Hargitay, the Hungarian bodybuilding champion turned actor who wed her mother in 1956 and raised Mariska and her older brothers – Miklós “Mickey” Jr and Zoltán – after she died in a tragic car accident aged 34.
The actress shared in her documentary that she always felt different to the rest of her family after mother’s passing, but she didn’t know what it was until someone showed her a photo of Italian entertainer Nelson Sardelli in her twenties.
Her mother had famously had a romance with Sardelli after filing for divorce from Mickey in 1963, only to reconcile with her former husband many months before Mariska was born in 1964.
When Mariska laid eyes on the photo, she said she immediately knew she was looking at her father. ”It was like the floor fell out from underneath me,” she recalled in her film, My Mom Jayne. “Like my infrastructure dissolved.”
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When she confronted Mickey though, he immediately denied it. The experience was so traumatising that she never dared to mention it to him again.
“He was my everything, my idol. He loved me so much, and I knew it,” she said of the man she knew as her father, who died in 2006.
But she couldn’t shake the skeleton in her closet, deciding in her thirties to go and see Sardelli perform in Atlantic City in the US in person. The moment she introduced herself to him he burst into tears, telling her, “I’ve been waiting 30 years for this moment”.
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Mariska wasn’t so forthcoming, telling Vanity Fair, “I went full Olivia Benson on him… I was like, ‘I don’t want anything, I don’t need anything from you.… I have a dad.’
“There was something about loyalty. I wanted to be loyal to Mickey,” she acknowledged.
Now 61, Mariska has since formed a bond with Sardelli and his daughters, but it came with a lot of confusion.
She says she spent a lot of time thinking about ”knowing I’m living a lie my entire life,” and wondering whether she was a wanted or “illegitimate” mistake.
Over time she said came to the realisation that her mother had returned to her former husband to provide a stable home for her young daughter.
“I grew up where I was supposed to, and I do know that everyone made the best choice for me,” she told the outlet.
“I’m Mickey Hargitay’s daughter – that is not a lie.”
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