Mariska Hargitay drops bombshell about her biological father: 'Living a lie'

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Mariska Hargitay is revealing the true identity of her biological father for the first time in a new documentary.

The Law & Order: SVU star delves into her family’s history in the new documentary My Mom Jayne and in an interview with Vanity Fair, Hargitay said she was “living a lie” until she learned the truth about her real father when she was 30.

After the death of her mother, Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield, in a car accident when she was just three years old, her dad Mickey raised her and her siblings.

“He was my everything, my idol. He loved me so much, and I knew it,” the 61-year-old told Vanity Fair. “I also knew something else — I just didn’t know what I knew.”

Hargitay says that she always felt she was different from her brothers and sisters and when she was in her 20s she saw a photo of Italian entertainer Nelson Sardelli, who her mother dated during a brief split from Mickey in the early 1960s before her birth in 1964.

She asked her dad about him, but Mickey, who died in 2006, found the exchange “so shattering” and wouldn’t talk about Sardelli. When she was 30, Hargitay saw the singer perform in Atlantic City. 

“It was like the floor fell out from underneath me,” she says in My Mom Jayne. “Like my infrastructure dissolved.” 

“I’ve been waiting 30 years for this moment,” she recalled him telling her after they met. 

But Hargitay said she went “full Olivia Benson on him.”

“I was like, ‘I don’t want anything, I don’t need anything from you … I have a dad.’ There was something about loyalty. I wanted to be loyal to Mickey,” she said.

Even though she struggled with “knowing I’m living a lie my entire life,” Hargitay eventually formed a relationship with Sardelli and his daughters and reconciled herself to the fact that her mother returned to Mickey because she knew he was the best thing for her daughter.

“I grew up where I was supposed to, and I do know that everyone made the best choice for me,” she said. “I’m Mickey Hargitay’s daughter — that is not a lie.”

She said the documentary, which is airing next month on HBO in the United States, is “a love letter to him.”

“There’s no one that I was closer to on this planet,” she said.

Sardelli’s daughters “just wept and wept and wept” when they saw Hargitay’s movie.

“These two women that I love so much – I made them secrets!” said Hargitay. “It’s so heartbreaking to me … I’m not good with lies. So, I also made this movie to unburden all of us.”

The film also allowed her to reexamine her mother’s legacy.

“I don’t remember the accident. I don’t even remember being told that my mother had died,” Hargitay says of the crash that killed her mother as she was in the back seat. “I look at photos, and I don’t really remember anything until I was five.”

One of her early memories is of how she didn’t like hearing her mother’s voice when she watched some of Mansfield’s old movies.

“When I would hear that fake voice, it used to just flip me out. I’d think, Why is she talking like that? That’s not real,” she told Vanity Fair.

But her dad, Mickey told Hargitay it was all just an act.

“My dad would always say, ‘She wasn’t like that at all. She was like you. She was funny and irreverent and fearless and real.’”

mdaniell@postmedia.com