Mariska Hargitay was 25 years old when she learned the stunning truth about her biological father from a man she had never met.
The “Law & Order: SVU” star spoke with Alex Cooper on the June 25 episode of Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast about how she found out her biological father is Italian singer Nelson Sardelli, not Hungarian bodybuilder and actor Mickey Hargitay.
Hargitay had journeyed to the home of Sabin Gray, a diehard fan of her late mother, actor and 1950s sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, to see his collection of Mansfield memorabilia. Hargitay, whose HBO documentary, “My Mom Jayne,” comes out on June 27, ended the visit with a shocking realization.
“It was a little overwhelming for me because there were life-size cutouts, and it was truly like a museum or a shrine to her,” Hargitay said. “That was hard for me at that age to sort of understand. … I’m seeing all this stuff that I had never seen and kind of grew up away from all of that.”
“He’s showing me all these photos. He’s showing me whatever it is, dresses that she had that he’d collected, earrings that she wore, things from movies from the movie set, props or whatever, and then he says to me, ‘Do you want to see a picture of Nelson?'” she recalled.
The question immediately unnerved Hargitay, who was 3 years old when her mother died in a car accident in 1967.
“I just looked at him, and this jolt went through my body, and I said, ‘Who’s Nelson?'” she said. “And then I knew in one second.”
Hargitay remembered the blood draining out of Gray’s face after asking her about Sardelli.
“He sort of panicked and turned white, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s probably not true, it’s probably not true,’ and that’s when I knew,” Hargitay said. “And I think that (Gray) couldn’t believe that I didn’t know. I was 25, how could I not know?”
Hargitay was then shown a picture of Sardelli.
“On a cellular level, it was just like DNA talking to DNA,” she said. “I knew it was true, and I just really thought my life was over.”
Hargitay was distraught as she departed Gray’s home.
“I remember leaving and driving to my brother’s house, and I thought I was going to crash my car because I was so not present,” she said. “I was totally dissociated and out of my body, and I got to my brother’s house. I didn’t even know how I got there, but I knew that I shouldn’t be driving. It was crazy.”
Hargitay’s world was upended. She was very close with Mickey Hargitay, who had raised her after Mansfield was killed in an accident in which Mariska and her two brothers, Zoltan and Mickey Jr., were also in the car.
“The one thing I did have, the one thing that I was rooted in, the one thing that was my constant, was no longer mine,” she said about realizing Mickey Hargitay was not her biological father. “And my identity was just smashed. It was like it broke in two.”
She struggled to deal with a “thousand pellets of hard truth.”
“(I’m) going, ‘My brothers aren’t my brothers, I’m not Hungarian, I’m not related to all my family that I grew up with in Hungary,'” she said.
It started to make sense to her why during her childhood “everyone asked me if I was Italian.”
Once she drove to the home of one of her brothers, she asked him if he knew about Sardelli being her biological father.
“I’m very, very, very, very close with my brother, and he didn’t (know), so then that was also confusing,” she said. “And then I went up to my dad’s house, and I was hysterically crying and in a state.”
She said Mickey Hargitay was in the process of physically building her a home when she asked him about Sardelli.
Mariska Hargitay talks about the “Law & Order: SVU” record-breaking 26th season, her iconic Olivia Benson costume being on display in the Smithsonian Museum and Dick Wolf having the “Law & Order” theme song as his ringtone.
“So I drive up to the house that he is building me and confront him, and he was like, ‘What? What are you talking about? Are you crazy? That’s so not true,'” she said.
“He kept saying, ‘You look like my father, you look exactly like my father, you’re a Hargitay to the end,'” she continued. “The irony is that I’m more like my dad than anyone in our whole family. Like, I am mini-Mickey, right? And so it was just a very extraordinarily painful moment. I say that this is the moment that I became an adult, and it’s so visceral for me because I was in so much pain, I was so overwhelmed.”
Despite finding out the stunning truth about her bloodline, she did not press Mickey Hargitay on the issue.
“I was so overwhelmed and I was in the ‘me, me, me, me, oh, my gosh, my life is over,’ and then looking at this man who’s been nothing but loving to me and nothing but this amazing father to me, and I saw his pain,” she said. “And I said, ‘It doesn’t matter what I feel. I love him. We’re done here.’
“And so I said, ‘OK, thank you for telling me,’ and I pretended that I believed him, and we never spoke of it again,” she continued. “And then he used to say, even before he died, ‘Remember when you thought that crazy thing?’ And I go, ‘I know, wasn’t that nuts?'”
Hargitay told Cooper she’ll “never know” the extent of Mickey’s knowledge on the matter.
“I think that he integrated it in, ‘This is my new reality,’” she said. “He made a choice and that was his new truth. And whether it’s true or not emotionally, it was his truth.”
While she was managing her emotions with Mickey, Hargitay also was reeling at the thought that Sardelli had not acknowledged her as his daughter.
“That was where the injury was,” she said, “is, why wasn’t I claimed? He must have known. He didn’t care, he didn’t love me, I wasn’t worth it, I was nothing to him. He knew, he had to know that I was his daughter, and I wasn’t worth it. I wasn’t valuable enough, and that’s what I lived with, is that I wasn’t enough.”
“So having that feeling of, my mother left me and then again my father abandoned me was so hard to integrate or make sense out of,” she added.
At 61 years old, Hargitay said she now has the benefit of being able to view the situation with more wisdom.
“I’m so grateful for this life to grow into the miracle of my story, and having this comprehensive understanding and getting the full perspective and now seeing that I had such a limited, teeny, teeny, teeny sliver of the truth (at the time),” she said.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
