Fifty years after her mother Jayne Mansfield’s tragic death, actress Mariska Hargitay is opening up about her grief.
“The way I’ve lived with loss is to lean into it,” she says in a new interview with People magazine. “As the saying goes, the only way out is through. In my life, certainly I’ve tried to avoid pain, loss, feeling things. But I’ve learned instead to really lean into it, because sooner or later you have to pay the piper.”
The Law & Order: SVU star believes her late mom is still present, even after all these years. “She’s with me still,” says Hargitay, who wants people to know her mother’s full legacy.
Mansfield was known for her sexuality and her roles in films like The Girl Can’t Help It, and Playgirl After Dark, but she was much more than that, Hargitay shares.
“My mother was this amazing, beautiful, glamorous sex symbol-but people didn’t know that she played the violin and had a 160 IQ and had five kids and loved dogs…She was just so ahead of her time. She was an inspiration, she had this appetite for life, and I think I share that with her.”
Hargitay was just three years old when her mother died in a car accident. Mansfield was just 34.
“Losing my mother at such an early age is the scar of my soul,” she previously told Redbook. “But I feel like it ultimately made me into the person I am today. I understand the journey of life. I had to go through what I did to be here.”
