LOS ANGELES — For most of her adult life, Mariska Hargitay kept her mother at arm’s length. Jayne Mansfield died in a car crash on a Louisiana highway in June 1967, when Hargitay was three years old, leaving behind a public legacy the entertainment industry had already shaped into mythology. What Hargitay knew of her mother had come filtered through that mythology. Sixty years later, she sat down with a camera and started asking the questions she had deferred. On Monday night, she walks onto the stage at the Peacock Theater in Downtown Los Angeles as host of the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards — carrying two gold statuettes she won nine days ago for the documentary that resulted.
Hargitay won Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program on September 5 at the 78th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. Both wins were for “My Mom Jayne,” the HBO documentary she wrote, directed, and made the subject of her most personal creative work. The victories lifted her career Emmy total to three, the first having come twenty years earlier when she won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
The position she occupies at Monday’s ceremony is unusual. Hargitay is the first woman to host the Primetime Emmy Awards in 15 years — the last was Jane Lynch, who presided over the ceremony for Fox in 2011. She is also arriving at the show as an active winner in its current cycle. Major awards shows have had nominated hosts and hosts who went home with trophies, but Hargitay’s situation has a different architecture: she won in a distinct category at a separate ceremony held nine days before the one she is running. She brings both roles into the Peacock Theater simultaneously.
“Bringing important stories into the light has been the heartbeat of my career,” Hargitay said when her hosting was announced. “It’s my great honor to host the 78th Emmy Awards — in the 100th birthday year of my beloved NBC — and celebrate this extraordinary community of storytellers.” On the historic dimension of her role, she was equally direct: “I was so incredibly honored — knowing it was the first woman in 15 years was absolutely thrilling, and I am somebody who takes on new challenges.”
“My Mom Jayne” premiered in the Cannes Classics section of the 78th Cannes Film Festival in May 2025, where it was nominated for the L’Oeil d’Or, the festival’s documentary prize. Hargitay then brought the film to the Tribeca Festival before its theatrical release and HBO and Max debut on June 27, 2025. The documentary was her first feature as a director. The subject was not a professional calculation.
The film resists the template of the celebrity biography. Drawing on never-before-seen home movies, photographs, and interviews with Hargitay’s siblings — Jayne Marie Mansfield, Mickey Hargitay Jr., Zoltan Hargitay, and Tony Cimber — as well as Mansfield’s former press secretary Raymond Strait, the documentary treats its subject as a woman whose private life remained, in many ways, unrecovered even by those closest to her. Among the questions Hargitay pursues is the identity of her biological father, which the film treats not as a mystery to be solved in a single reveal but as a thread that opens outward into what gets withheld across generations.
Mansfield died at thirty-four, on June 29, 1967, in a crash on a Louisiana state highway while traveling between nightclub appearances. She had been one of the most photographed and most caricatured women in Hollywood — a blonde sex symbol whose wit and business intelligence were rarely acknowledged by the industry that promoted the image. Hargitay was present in the car as a child; she survived the crash. The gap between what Mansfield’s public mythology communicated and what Hargitay understood of her mother as a person is the engine of the documentary.
The SVU career adds its own dimension to the Emmy wins. Hargitay has played Detective Olivia Benson since 1999, joining the show when it premiered as a spinoff of the original Law & Order. Over 27 seasons, she moved from star to executive producer, and the show became one of American television’s most durable institutional presences. Her 2006 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama marked one kind of recognition. The Creative Arts wins for “My Mom Jayne” mark another — one that locates her not as an actress receiving a career honor but as a filmmaker who chose her most privately significant material as her feature debut.
The 78th Emmy Awards air Monday on NBC and Peacock, with the ceremony beginning at the Peacock Theater at 8:00 PM ET. As the Emmy competition in Drama and Comedy unfolds across the evening, Hargitay will be managing the stage rather than watching it from a seat. Whether that produces the kind of television moment that sticks to memory is the question she carries into tonight. The two Emmys she already has are settled. The third act of the evening has not been written yet.
