Mariska Hargitay shares the surprising way she discovered her biological father's identity

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The Mariska Hargitay-directed documentary “My Mom Jayne” covers a lot of ground about actress Jayne Mansfield’s life and about Hargitay’s attempts to reconnect with the memory of her mother. 

The film had its share of bombshells, most notably that Hargitay found out as an adult that the man who raised her wasn’t her biological father and that, in the chaos of the car crash that killed her mother, Hargitay was left behind at the scene as a 3-year-old. 

The documentary also reveals that Mansfield hungered to be a serious actress despite her “dumb blonde” image.

Mariska found out that Mickey Hargitay wasn’t her biological father 

Hargitay revealed for the first time in the documentary that Mickey Hargitay wasn’t her biological father as she believed her entire childhood.

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When she was 25, she said she was talking with the head of Jayne Mansfield’s fan club, Sabin Gray, and he inadvertently told her about her biological father. 

“He’s showing me all these photos,” the “Law & Order: SVU” star told Alex Cooper this week on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “He’s showing me whatever it is, dresses that she had that he’d collected, earrings that she wore, things from movies from the movie set, props or whatever, and then he says to me, ‘Do you want to see a picture of Nelson?'” 

She added, “I just looked at him, and this jolt went through my body, and I said, ‘Who’s Nelson?’ And then I knew in one second.”

She said in the documentary, “That’s when like I think the blood just drained out of his face and he sort of went white as a ghost and he looked at me panicked and he said, ‘Well, it’s probably not true,’” adding that he then showed her pictures of a man who “looked like the male version of me.” 

She told Cooper, “And I think that (Gray) couldn’t believe that I didn’t know. I was 25, how could I not know?”

She said in the film, “It was like the floor fell out from underneath me. Just the bottom dropped out of everything. It was like my infrastructure dissolved and life as I knew it was irrevocably changed.”

She told Cooper that she felt like she was going to crash her car after she left Sabin’s house “because I was so not present. I was totally dissociated and out of my body, and I got to my brother’s house. I didn’t even know how I got there, but I knew that I shouldn’t be driving. It was crazy.”

After that, she said she then confronted her father, asking him, “Why didn’t you tell me you’re not my father? You lied to me.”

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But he told her that was “bulls—.”

“I was in so much pain,” she said in the documentary, “but I could see his pain was almost worse, so I decided I would never talk about it again, and I would never bring it up to him again, and I never did,” she said. “But the fact is I had bad years after that.”

She said she didn’t tell anyone, and would just go to bed crying every night for a long time. 

Hargitay had an identity crisis over the revelation.

“Who was I related to? Who did I belong to? And then, on top of it, I was born out of some affair like some illegitimate, sinful mistake? I was so angry at my mother for leaving me in this mess and for hurting my father and for leaving me feeling so alone and untethered,” she admitted. 

She said for her own survival she “disowned the part of myself that was my mother’s daughter.”

Meeting her biological father 

When she was 30, she decided to go see her biological father, Nelson Sardelli, who was performing in Atlantic City at the time. 

“And after the show he came out and I said, ‘Hi, Nelson, my name is Mariska Hargitay. I understand you knew my mother,'” she said.

He burst into tears and told her “‘I’ve been waiting 30 years for this moment,'” she said, adding that they stayed up until 5 in the morning talking that night, and he told her what had happened. 

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“That was 30 years ago, and I’ve kept it a secret ever since,” she added. 

Sardelli said he met Mansfield in Atlanta, and she asked him to see her show. When the show was over, she asked to go for a ride in his car. 

He said that at the time Mansfield and Hargitay weren’t talking to each other, and she and Sardelli began publicly dating, and he was even introduced to her kids. They performed together, made a movie together and went all over Europe together. 

He found out Mansfield was pregnant with his child while they were in Europe. 

Hargitay read a letter in the documentary that Mansfield wrote to her mother talking about “going through perhaps the most trying time” of her life while she was pregnant with Hargitay and having “the love of two men – a very deep love from each of them. I hope God shows me the way soon because I have really been depressed as of late.” 

Sardelli said in the documentary that he broke up with her in Europe, and they never spoke again, which he called the “biggest shame” of his life, acknowledging “a lot of people paid the price for this love affair that we had.”

“I can’t imagine what your father felt, but I am grateful to him,” he said. 

He told Hargitay after Mansfield died, her grandmother wanted him to “rock the boat and claim you or something but by that time Mickey was the father you knew, and your siblings they were your siblings. What would I be accomplishing that would be beneficial to you?” 

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Years later, he said he talked to Mickey once and Hargitay told him, “‘Nelson, nobody has to tell me who’s the father of my child,’ and I said to him, ‘I will not embarrass you in any way. Never.’” 

Hargitay’s stepmom told her that if Sardelli ever came up in conversation, he would only tell her, “I’m her father, period.” 

“Mickey was a great father, and he was so full of love for you, but I think Mickey was quite capable of shutting out pain, which I think he did a lot with Jayne, so he said Mariska’s my daughter, and he said that until the day he passed,” she added. 

Hargitay said she spent 30 years trying to hide her story “to honor my dad, but something that I’ve also realized is that sometimes keeping a secret doesn’t honor anyone.”

Reacting to the truth being revealed for the first time in her documentary, Sardelli said it felt like a “stronger, higher power is forgiving me. There is nothing I can change, but I regret having extricated myself from your mother’s life because I think certain things would not have happened to her.”

He added that he’d like to be able to have one more conversation with Mickey and apologize to him, “because I’m sure I was part of his suffering.”

Hargitay added, “I’ve spent most of my life feeling ashamed of my mother, a person who I had no memory of, a person whose voice I didn’t want to hear, a person’s whose career made me want to do it differently, a person who made her share of problematic choices and left me with loss and secrets, but at 60 years old I feel different.”

Hargitay also met her half-siblings Giovanna and Pietra Sardelli, who kept the secret as well. 

Giovanna said she once confronted her father as a child after finding a secret letter he’d kept written from Mansfield’s mother, telling him he had an “amazing child that’s yours,” but he told Giovanna that Hargitay is a “little girl, has a father who loves her like I love you. This little girl is safe.” 

Pietra interjected, “’And if she is OK, she just lost her mother. You cannot take the only family she knows,’ and that was their decision and that’s why they stayed quiet.” 

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“And that made sense to me and I tucked that away.” Giovanna said, adding that she remembered coming years later to Mariska’s birthday party and telling Katie Couric when the journalist asked, that they weren’t related, they were just family friends. 

“My need to honor Mickey was so huge, but the fact is I was wrong, because you guys had to live all these years with the secret, and you were so generous, so generous to me,” Hargitay told her sisters.

Hargitay was left behind after deadly crash 

While the documentary doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the Mississippi crash that killed Mansfield and two others, Hargitay’s brother Zolton Hargitay, who was 6 at the time, said he remembered his mother had been sitting in the back seat with the children before moving into the front seat. 

He said she had been arguing with her boyfriend, then she got out of the car and called their father before she moved into the front seat. 

Zoltan remembered her comforting him before the crash, “telling me I was going to be fine, 20 minutes later, half an hour, whatever, I heard her scream so loud, and that was it – just silence.”

The car had crashed into a tractor trailer that had slowed down around 2 in the morning on June 29, 1967, killing Mansfield, her boyfriend and the driver of the car. 

Mariska, Zoltan and Mickey Hargitay, Jr. were in the back seat at the time and survived. 

“I often think about why she didn’t just stay in the back seat with us,” Zolton said through tears. 

Zoltan said he remembered being in a car on the way to the hospital and looking around before saying, “Where’s Maria?” referring to Mariska. “And they said ‘Who’s Maria,’ so then we doubled back.”

Ellen Hargitay, Mariska’s stepmom, said when they went back, she was found “lodged underneath the passenger seat with a head injury and – thank God, thank God Zolie woke up.” 

Mansfield had no will when she died at 34

Mansfield didn’t have a will at the time of her death at 34 years old in 1967, “So the state sold off her belongings to pay her debts and there were just a handful of items that my siblings and I were able to keep,” Hargitay explained in the doc. 

She added, “For me, a lot of this is about reclaiming what was lost. Even physical things.” Hargitay finally went through the family storage unit, which she said hadn’t been opened since 1969, two years after her mother’s death.

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A poignant moment near the end of the film showed Hargitay’s husband, Peter Hermann, surprising her with Mansfield’s piano. The actress was both a pianist and violinist. 

Mickey wasn’t over Mansfield when he married Hargitay’s stepmom 

Hargitay’s stepmom, Ellen Hargitay, said she’s sure Mansfield’s widower was “not over her” when they met and started dating. 

“Because she passed away June 29, 1967, and Mickey and I got married in April of 1968. But you always have them with you,” she said. “There’s no way when you love somebody that they ever leave your heart. I don’t care who, I don’t care how angry you are, I don’t care anything. If you really love somebody they remain in there.”

Mansfield’s oldest child, Jayne Marie Mansfield, said: “It was love at first sight with Mickey [Hargitay]. It really was, and he was just such a nice man, you could just see that she was so happy.”

Hargitay and Mansfield divorced in 1963, four years before her death. 

Her daughter Jayne said she believes her mom became depressed shortly before her divorce from Hargitay.

“Her career wasn’t going well, so she went back to these parts for dumb blondes,” Mansfield explained. “I don’t think it was easy for her. But I don’t think it was easy for Mickey either. She was completely absorbed in negativity because she wasn’t doing the kind of work she dreamed of doing, and I believe she became a victim of depression. You know you’re never yourself when you’re depressed.”

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Ellen said Mansfield started meeting other men and “the marriage fell apart. I think Mickey was hurt deeply by Jayne. I think she blew it when she divorced Mickey.” 

“Mickey was the most positive influence in her life and even though he might have felt a lot of pain, he loved her. He always loved her even after they were divorced,” she added. 

Mansfield came back to him many times after their divorce, and they were together again for a few months around the time she was pregnant with Mariska, Jayne said. 

Mansfield personified a ‘dumb blonde’ character 

Hargitay said her mother’s baby whisper voice used to annoy her, and she would try not to listen to it when she heard her. 

“She didn’t always talk like that,” Hargitay said, adding that her mother had copied Marilyn Monroe in that way. 

Her former publicist Rusty Strait said she personified that character because it was what the studio wanted at the time. 

But at home, her daughter Jayne said she “didn’t put on any of those airs,” and wore her hair in a scarf and no makeup. 

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“But she was also very eloquent. She spoke French, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, and she wanted us to be exposed to more [in life],” she added. 

Her son, Zoltan, said he “kind of looked the other way” when his mom did her “public voice. Because I knew she was really, really smart.” 

Jayne said her mother told her she wanted to be a serious actress but “the parts didn’t come in so she did what she had to do.”

She said Mansfield had “great admiration” for Marilyn Monroe, but eventually realized “that blonde persona is a box,” adding that her mom told her around the time of Monroe’s death in 1962 that “she wanted to reverse that image.” 

“My Mom Jayne” premiered on HBO on Friday and is streaming on Max.