Surprising & Dark Facts About Law and Order: SVU Star Mariska Hargitay

Mariska Hargitay's mother was Hollywood actress Jayne Mansfield, a major star in the '50s and '60s who rivaled the popularity of Marilyn Monroe. In 1967, Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay (Mariska's father) were in a fatal collision with a semi-trailer truck that not only felled Mansfield, but also her driver Ronald Harrison and lawyer Samuel Brody.

Mariska and two of her brothers were asleep in the back seat, and were miraculously spared. The crash was so tragic it led to the requirement of underride bars on semi-trailer trucks, which are also known by the name "Mansfield bars."

Because she was so young when her mother passed, Hargitay's memories of her are fleeting, and she remembers nothing of the crash that took her life (although she does still bear a scar from it). It took years for Hargitay to fully feel the tragedy of that day's events.

When she did, at 22, she suffered from depression, and only made it through with the help of her siblings and her father. She has referred to her mother's passing as the scar of her soul, while adding that being a mother herself has made her feel closer to her own mom.  

After Jayne Mansfield's passing, Mariska's father, Mickey, married a flight attendant named Ellen Siano. In her 2008 profile on E! True Hollywood Story, Mariska describes how she nearly lost a mother yet again only six years after losing her birth mother.

Siano was working on a flight to Los Angeles when the plane encountered turbulence so severe that it ended the life of one passenger and four others had to be hospitalized. Siano was thrown from the floor to the ceiling 56 times.

Hargitay started the organization Joyful Heart in 2004. Her work on the show exposed her to statistics about real-life sexual assault, and she wanted to do something real for the people who had written her about their actual experiences. She established Joyful Heart in Hawaii, but it soon developed into a national organization.

By 2017, 18,000 survivors received help from the organization, which had also raised nearly $200 million by that point. 

Though Jayne Mansfield's popularity had declined somewhat from its late 1950s apex, she was still a major Hollywood persona at the time of her passing in 1967. Legal fees and other expenses chipped away at her estate until there was very little left for her children. According to Hargitay, at some point thereafter, people broke into her house and stole her jewelry and other belongings.

Over the years, collectors wound up with various pieces of Jayne Mansfield memorability, and Hargitay eventually had to buy back her own mother's charm bracelet to have something to remember her by.

Hargitay's father, Mickey, was diagnosed with bone cancer in the early 2000s. Hargitay was very close with her father, as he raised her after her mother's untimely passing. The cancer ended his life in 2006. Hargitay said she had to take time off work to process the passing of her father.

Her father's passing, coupled with an on-set injury, caused old emotional wounds to open: "I was lucky enough to have a father who said, 'Don't quit.' So I just kept going," she told Red Book.