LOS ANGELES — When Mariska Hargitay accepted the Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Documentary or Nonfiction Program at the Peacock Theater on September 5, she thanked the woman who died before Hargitay ever had the chance to know her.
Jayne Mansfield, the platinum-blond actress who embodied a particular strain of 1950s Hollywood excess, died at 40 in a Louisiana highway accident in June 1967. For nearly six decades, she remained a missing piece at the center of her daughter’s life. Hargitay was three years old when the crash occurred. She was in the back seat.
My Mom Jayne, the HBO documentary Hargitay directed and produced, is her effort to fill that absence. The film won two Emmys at the 78th Emmy Awards Creative Arts ceremonies, taking Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing. Four days later, Hargitay will return to the same building, this time as host of the main ceremony. She will be the first woman to hold the role since Jane Lynch in 2011.
At the podium, Hargitay invoked Gloria Steinem’s instruction to “tell your own story” and said that making the film allowed her to finally meet her mother. The experience, she said, was “a gift that is indescribable.” When she accepted the directing award moments later, she returned to the same theme, telling the audience that it had taken her time to understand that the story was hers to tell.
The victories marked Hargitay’s first Emmys in 20 years. Her previous award came in 2006, when she won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, the series she has anchored for 27 seasons. These are her first Emmys as a filmmaker.
My Mom Jayne had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival’s Classics section in May 2025, where it was received as both a personal documentary and a revisionist portrait of a figure Hollywood had long reduced to caricature. The film drew on never-before-seen photographs and home movies that Hargitay and her siblings had not touched since their mother’s death, as well as memorabilia recovered from a storage unit the family had left undisturbed for years. Through those materials and interviews with family members, the documentary attempts to reconstruct Mansfield as a working actress and a mother, not the tabloid fixture who dominated the entertainment press of the 1950s and 1960s.
Jayne Mansfield’s standing in Hollywood history is fixed at the intersection of genuine box-office appeal and tabloid damage. She was among the highest-paid actresses in America in 1956 and 1957, earned a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year, and appeared so regularly in newspaper columns that her public persona became inseparable from the business of being seen. The car accident on June 29, 1967, near Slidell, Louisiana, killed Mansfield, her companion Sam Brody, and their driver. Hargitay and her brothers Mickey Jr. and Zoltan were in the back seat and survived. Hargitay was three years old.
The subject stayed largely untouched publicly for most of Hargitay’s career. She built her standing on SVU, through her founding of the Joyful Heart Foundation, and in the broader conversation around survivors of sexual violence, largely without invoking her mother’s name. My Mom Jayne was the project she arrived at when she finally felt ready to look.
Rebel Wilson also premiered her documentary directorial debut at TIFF this week, one of several high-profile nonfiction projects that have surfaced at major festivals this fall. My Mom Jayne, arriving on a different path, has already staked its claim on the season: it is holding two Emmys.
As The Hollywood Reporter reported, Hargitay is the first woman to host the Emmys since Jane Lynch at the 63rd ceremony in 2011, a gap of 15 years. Whether the Television Academy intended to place its winning documentary filmmaker in the hosting chair four days later is not something the institution has addressed. The effect is unusual regardless: she will step to the stage Monday to announce the night’s biggest prizes having collected two of her own on Saturday.
Her hosting duties will place her in front of a race dominated by The Pitt, the HBO Max medical drama entering the 78th Emmy Awards ceremony with 25 nominations as the defending champion, and the comedy contest between Hacks, which holds a record 24 nominations, and Widow’s Bay, the current frontrunner to deny Hacks the headline prize.
What her wins on September 5 do not answer is the simplest question the documentary was built to ask: who was Jayne Mansfield to her daughter, not to the studio that promoted her or the press that covered her. Hargitay was three when her mother died. She is 62 now. The film was the closest thing she had to a conversation.
The 78th Primetime Emmy Awards air Monday, September 14 on NBC and Peacock. The ceremony begins at 8 p.m. ET.
