ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
In the 1950s, Jayne Mansfield was one of Hollywood's biggest stars, with blonde, bombshell looks and a babydoll voice.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "MY MOM JAYNE")
JAYNE MANSFIELD: I use my pinup-type publicity to get my foot in the door.
SHAPIRO: Underneath that affect was a savvy woman who spoke five languages and played the violin and piano. Here she was on the Ed Sullivan show in 1957.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHAPIRO: Jayne Mansfield was only 34 years old when she died in a car crash. In the back seat of that car was her 3-year-old daughter, Mariska Hargitay. That little girl grew up to be an acclaimed actress in her own right, winning an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her work on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." But she never dug deeply into the story of her mother until now. Mariska Hargitay is director of the new HBO documentary "My Mom Jayne." Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MARISKA HARGITAY: So happy to be here.
SHAPIRO: Your dad told you not to read the books about your mother, and for most of your life, you didn't. But at the beginning of this film, you sit down with your older siblings and you ask what they remember about your mother. Here's a memory that your sister Jayne Marie shared.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "MY MOM JAYNE")
JAYNE MARIE MANSFIELD: One time, it was Easter. It was just her and me, and she said, I got a surprise for you. Go into the bathroom. And I go in there and open the door, and there's hundreds of little baby chicks.
SHAPIRO: Why do you think you never asked your siblings for their memories about your mother until you started working on this project?
M HARGITAY: I think it was so emotionally loaded for me and complicated. And there was this dead end, that I felt like I would never get what I wanted or what I needed from that kind of conversation.
SHAPIRO: Did you watch her movies when you were a kid? When YouTube came along, did you look up YouTube videos?
M HARGITAY: A little bit, a little bit here and there. But, you know, as I discuss in the movie, that public voice was quite painful to me and quite upsetting to me. And so as I heard that, I distanced myself from it because I didn't understand it. And I've always - like, that is something that I use to decide who's safe to be around and who's not. When somebody has a low and sort of resonant voice, I'm like, OK, I'm safe. I'm good. And so that voice, because it - I knew it wasn't real, I didn't want anything to do with it because I wasn't interested in anything that wasn't real.
SHAPIRO: Did you always know it wasn't real, or was that something you learned over the course of making this film? Because it becomes clear very early on in the movie that this pin-up persona she was known for was a facade, and it seems like she got trapped in it.
M HARGITAY: Very much so. I always knew that it wasn't real because my dad would tell me that she was very different at home. So I knew that she was different at home. I knew that she had this incredible sense of humor. And I knew it from comments, you know, that my siblings would make. I didn't understand the choices, and I became intolerant to hearing it. And I just didn't want to be around it. I didn't - I avoided it at all costs. Like I said, I really excised that part of her from myself, and that's when I sort of settled into, I'm doing this differently.
SHAPIRO: Well, you say I'm doing this differently. Do you think your choices as an actress were consciously or unconsciously a reaction to her career? I mean, you've played Olivia Benson on "Law & Order: SVU" since 1999, the longest-running scripted live-action series in TV history. Olivia is a very serious person.
M HARGITAY: Very (laughter). Yeah, she's a very serious person. And it can't be an accident. I think that so many of my choices consciously and unconsciously, you know, were guided by that history of me knowing that she was so much more and that she got trapped or locked in or didn't get out of it - was so upsetting to me. And I think that I feel so lucky and grateful to have had such an incredibly strong father that really deeply ingrained in me that I would have my own sort of code of ethics and my - that nobody would ever, could ever put me in a box. And he always said to me, you decide who you are. Nobody tells you who you are.
SHAPIRO: The movie has so many twists and turns, and I don't want to give away any spoilers. There is one scene where you hear the details of the car crash that killed your mother for what appears to be the first time.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "MY MOM JAYNE")
ZOLTAN HARGITAY: Twenty minutes later, half an hour - whatever - (crying) I heard her scream so loud. And that was it. It just was silence.
SHAPIRO: Can you describe what that felt like to actually learn the moment by moment of that event that you were in, that you were 3 years old for?
M HARGITAY: I think, as a mother of three, hearing that, all I could think of was wanting to take care of my sweet brother and wanting to take away his pain for being conscious and for carrying that with - carrying that his entire life. Because he was so little, right? And it's such a little - that's a part of him that is so tender and so small and felt so powerless. I think that is - that was excruciating.
SHAPIRO: Yeah. The documentary evolves in ways that go beyond your mother's story, and it includes revelations about your life that create a kind of a before and after. And so can you tell us what the after feels like for you? Obviously, I'm being a little bit oblique here.
M HARGITAY: I feel like a thousand-pound weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I feel so grateful, so much lighter. I feel that I have so much more internal space. I feel freer. I feel - you know, we have little voices in us - right? - and our whole life is about learning to listen to that inner voice. And I knew I had to make this movie, and I wanted to make this movie because we all have family stuff. We all have these complications, things that we are scared to go towards, things that are left unsaid. What I learned is through tolerance, patience, curiosity, love, gentleness, the rewards that I got for going through the fire were exponential. And I just want to invite people to ask those questions.
SHAPIRO: Mariska Hargitay, daughter of Jayne Mansfield, is the director of the documentary "My Mom Jayne." Thank you so much.
M HARGITAY: Thank you.
SHAPIRO: It airs tomorrow on HBO, and you can stream it on Max.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCADE FIRE AND OWN PALLETT'S "DIMENSIONS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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