Jayne Mansfield has been gone for nearly 60 years. Her daughter has spent most of that time trying to figure out who she actually was.
"My Mom Jayne," the HBO documentary written and directed by Mariska Hargitay, premiered on June 27, 2026, following earlier festival runs at Cannes and Tribeca in 2025. The film is Hargitay's attempt to separate her mother from the caricature — the platinum-blonde 1950s sex symbol who was, by most industry accounts, reduced to a punchline even at the height of her fame.
Mansfield died in a car crash in 1967, when Hargitay was just three years old. That means almost everything Hargitay knows about her mother comes secondhand — from old interviews, studio photographs, home movies, and the people who were still alive to talk about her. The documentary follows Hargitay as she works through that material, interviewing family members and digging into interviews most audiences have never seen.
What makes the project notable isn't just the subject matter — it's the fact that Hargitay, after 26 seasons of playing Captain Olivia Benson on "Law & Order: SVU," chose this as her first major work behind the camera. She wasn't just producing a tribute; she was directing an investigation into her own origin story.
The response has been strong enough that Hargitay walked away from the 2026 Emmys with two statuettes for the film, part of a Creative Arts ceremony that also recognized "Hacks," "The Pitt," and "Widow's Bay." For a performer whose entire career has been about listening to other people's hardest stories, turning that same patience toward her own mother's life — six decades after losing her — is the kind of project that explains itself the moment you hear the premise.