A photo of Jayne Mansfield and Mariska Hargitay in 'My Mom Jayne.' Alamy Stock Photo/HBO Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment For a good portion of Mariska Hargitay's life, strangers knew more about her mother than she did. So it's fitting that when Hargitay first appears onscreen in My Mom Jayne, her exquisite and gripping documentary, she's surrounded by demolition-site rubble, the remains of the Sunset Boulevard mansion that was her first childhood home. The film she's made traces a years-long process of excavation, sifting through not just movie-star memorabilia but Hargitay's conflicted feelings about Jayne Mansfield, the blond bombshell who was a mother of five when she died in a horrendous car crash at 34. Related Stories TV Reneé Rapp Says She Wants to Play Mariska Hargitay's "Lover" on 'Law & Order: SVU' Movies Oscars: Mariska Hargitay's Jayne Mansfield Doc 'My Mom Jayne' Has Qualified, Campaign to Come (Exclusive) Fascinating every step of the way, My Mom Jayne builds toward the public revelation of a secret that Hargitay held close for 30 years, and which was already a 30-year secret when she became aware of it. As the actor turned director declares in the film's final minutes, making the doc was an act of "reclaiming my own story," an achievement that's doubly poignant because this is precisely the kind of reclamation her mother yearned for. My Mom Jayne The Bottom Line Plainspoken and tenderhearted. Director: Mariska Hargitay 1 hour 45 minutes A classical musician who spoke five languages, the Pennsylvania native made the trek to Hollywood with serious actorly ambitions, and was promptly corralled by a studio casting director into tight dresses and a peroxide-lightened do. She was only 22 when she starred on Broadway opposite Walter Matthau in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, essentially playing a sendup of Marilyn Monroe (a few years her elder, and at the apex of the showbiz fame factory). She reprised the part in the 1957 movie of the same name, the second of two Frank Tashlin comedies she toplined, the first being the 1956 musical The Girl Can't Help It. Mansfield had key roles in the courtroom drama Illegal, starring Edward G. Robinson, and an adaptation of Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus, but it was the far lighter fare, spoofy and concerned with showing off her famous measurements, that put her on the map. She embodied a hyperfeminine ideal particular to the '50s and '60s, almost cartoonish in its soft and weightless voluptuousness - and a distinct contrast to the grounded levelheadedness of Hargitay's signature role, the crisis-defusing police detective she's played on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for a quarter-century. It's bracing to hear Hargitay, in the candid and compelling first-person voiceover that guides some sequences, admit to youthful feelings of shame about her mother's professional profile as a sexpot. In conversation with one of her siblings, she's endearingly direct about how Mansfield's breathy public voice - a key element of the Monroe-esque arsenal - sounds gratingly fake to her. Interview clips make painfully clear that Mansfield was aching to cast off the sex symbol stuff, that it had become a kind of prison, even as she was grateful for the career it afforded her. "I use it as a means to an end," she tells one TV host, an amiable smile on her lips and a burning intelligence flashing in her eyes. "I'm ready to be myself," she tells Jack Paar in another, later small-screen appearance. It turns out, though, that however eager she might have been to break out of the screen-siren routine, Hollywood was not so ready for that change in the game plan. And so she took the bombshell shtick out on the road as a nightclub performer, a sad concession to the industry on the one hand and, on the other, an exuberant new go at life from another angle. At the helm of a film for the first time (she's directed nine episodes of SVU), Hargitay deploys an exceptionally rich and incisive selection of vintage stills and footage. With sharp editing by J.D. Marlow, My Mom Jayne moves between past and present, public and private, pop-culture surfaces and family mysteries with clarity and a steadily building undercurrent of emotion. A key figure in the archival mix, besides Mansfield herself, is her second husband, Mickey Hargitay, a Hungary-born athlete, dancer and actor, and onetime holder of the Mr. Universe title, who died in 2006. They were divorced at the time of her death, but it was with him that the thrice-married Mansfield apparently enjoyed her most stable and fulfilling relationship. As Mariska's beloved father, he's a strong presence in the doc, which includes publicity glimpses of family life at the villa on Sunset, complete with heart-shaped pool and exotic animals. The new interviews are heart-to-heart si