Mariska Hargitay ‘Is Done Hiding Things’ After Opening Up About Family Secret in Documentary

Mariska Hargitay remembers it like it was yesterday. She was 30, and she saw that Italian entertainer Nelson Sardelli — the man she’d learned five years earlier is her biological father simply by seeing a photo of him — was playing in Atlantic City. So she and a friend went to see his show. Afterward, Mariska came face to face with Nelson for the first time, and what happened next changed her life forever.

“He looked at me and burst into tears,” she recalls. “He told me the whole story. And I’ve kept it a secret ever since.”

The whole story goes like this: When Mariska’s mother, Hollywood bombshell Jayne Mansfield, filed for divorce from Mickey Hargitay in 1963, she began a whirlwind romance with Nelson, only to reconcile with Mickey several months before Mariska’s birth in 1964.

Jayne’s love affair with Nelson — during which Mariska was conceived — ended abruptly one day when Jayne asked him a question: Would he take back a woman if she got pregnant by another man? Nelson, realizing Jayne still loved her estranged husband, told her it was over on the spot, and they never saw each other again.

In Mariska’s HBO documentary, My Mom Jayne, Nelson says he never contacted Jayne, nor did he try to see Mariska out of respect for Mickey, who raised her and said until the day he died at age 80 in 2006 that he was her father even though he knew Nelson was her biological father.

All three kept the secret for over 30 years. Mariska even forced Nelson’s children — her half siblings — to lie about their true relationship (while young, her half sisters discovered the truth when they found a letter Mariska’s grandmother — who also knew the truth — wrote to Nelson asking him to claim Mariska).

“I never set out to hurt anybody, and I’m sorry if I did,” the Law & Order: SVU star tells her half sisters (who look exactly like her) in the documentary. “That’s so hard, that I didn’t have the wisdom at the time to say that was not yours to carry. The fact is, I was wrong, because you guys had to live all these years with the secret.”

Why did she really lie? To protect her father, Mickey. When Mariska learned the truth at age 25, she confronted Mickey. He vehemently denied it and grew angry. “I was in so much pain, but I could see his pain was almost worse. So I decided I would never talk about it again, and I never did.”

Mariska adored her father. “He was my everything, my idol,” she says. “He loved me so much, and I knew it.”

Mickey raised the kids on his own after Jayne was tragically killed in a car accident at age 34 in 1967. Mariska, then 3, was asleep in the back seat of the car when it collided with a tractor trailer. She miraculously survived, along with her siblings, but their mother did not. “I don’t remember the accident,” Mariska confides 58 years later. “I don’t even remember being told that my mother had died. I look at photos, and I don’t really remember anything until I was 5.”

Mariska’s documentary is getting rave reviews and could win the star an Oscar. But she didn’t do it for recognition. She was tired of keeping secrets. She wanted to make everything right. “She’s done hiding things,” says an insider. “She’s an open book. There are no more secrets.”

She also wanted to honor her mom. Growing up, she pushed her mother out of her mind. She didn’t like Jayne’s image as a blond bimbo. “I was embarrassed by the choices that she made,” she shares.

Mariska even hated Jayne’s voice. “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.’” (Turns out the cutesy voice was all for show; at home, she spoke normally.)

Plus, “I was born out of some affair? I was so angry at my mother, her leaving me in this mess and for hurting my father, and for me feeling so alone.”

But as the years went on, Mariska began to embrace her mother, and she wanted to tell her story.

Mariska also wanted to tell her own story and make up for past mistakes. As she says, “Sometimes keeping a secret doesn’t honor anyone.”