Mariska Hargitay Says It’s A ‘Miracle’ That Biological Father’s Identity Was Kept A Secret

Mariska Hargitay continues to feel relief at being able to confront a long-held family secret on her own terms.

Hargitay, 61, is making her feature directorial debut with “My Mom Jayne,” a documentary about her late mother, screen legend Jayne Mansfield, that premieres Friday on HBO. In the film, she reveals musician Nelson Sardelli to be her biological father, though she was raised by bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, whom she viewed as her dad.

The “Law & Order: SVU” actor last month shared how she made the discovery, telling Vanity Fair she began coming to terms with “knowing” she’d been “living a lie my entire life” around the time she was 30. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in a new interview this week, she said she feared the news would somehow become public fodder prior to the release of “My Mom Jayne.”

“I was so fearful to have to confront it before I was ready to,” she told the outlet. “Thank God it never went anywhere. It’s been a real gift to me to be able to tell it in my time when I was ready.”

Mansfield, whose popularity rivaled Marilyn Monroe during her lifetime, was married to Mickey Hargitay from 1958 to 1964. She and Sardelli had a brief affair in the early 1960s.

In “My Mom Jayne,” Hargitay says she began suspecting Mickey Hargitay wasn’t her father in her 20s. Upon learning with certainty that Sardelli was her father, however, she decided to keep the truth a secret out of loyalty to Mickey Hargitay, who raised her as his own after Mansfield’s death in 1967 and referred to her as his daughter until his own death in 2006.

The truth about Hargitay’s parentage was first publicly revealed in “Here They Are, Jayne Mansfield,” a 1992 biography written by Mansfield’s former press agent, Raymond Strait. Remarkably, the revelation stayed largely under wraps at the time of the book’s publication.

“The fact is that the story was out there in a lot of places,” Hargitay told EW. “And so, the fact that it never came out is nothing short of a miracle, truly.”

Describing “My Mom Jayne” as a “healing experience” for her and her siblings, Hargitay said she’s learned to embrace her unusual family structure.

“Nothing could change my love, respect, admiration and gratitude for [Mickey Hargitay],” she said. “And as I got to know Nelson, as he explained to me what happened, it just became a much more three-dimensional story. I realized that everyone’s doing the best they can. It wasn’t so black and white anymore to me.”