Mariska Hargitay won two Creative Arts Emmys on September 5, 2026, for “My Mom Jayne,” the HBO documentary she wrote and directed about her mother, 1950s screen icon Jayne Mansfield. The film took Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program, according to IJR, marking Hargitay’s first Emmy wins since her Law & Order: SVU acting trophy roughly two decades ago.

Key Points

• “My Mom Jayne” is Hargitay’s feature directorial debut; it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 before airing on HBO that June, per Wikipedia.
• The film won Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program at the Creative Arts Emmys.
• Hargitay was three years old when Jayne Mansfield died in a June 1967 car accident in Louisiana at age 34.
• Mansfield’s crash is widely credited with prompting the “Mansfield bar,” the rear underride guard now required on large trucks, according to J.D. Power.
• Hargitay hosted the main Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony days later, becoming the first woman to emcee the show in 15 years.

Long before she was a punchline about platinum hair and a publicity stunt, Jayne Mansfield was a working actress with real range. She starred in the Broadway comedy “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” before reprising the role on film in 1957, and headlined “The Girl Can’t Help It” in 1956, a rock-and-roll satire now considered a genre touchstone, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Studios marketed her as a rival to Marilyn Monroe, and she leaned into the “smartest dumb blonde” persona hard enough that it nearly obscured the fact she actually studied violin, piano, and languages.

Mansfield’s life ended abruptly on June 29, 1967, when the car she was riding in struck the rear of a tractor-trailer outside New Orleans; she, her driver, and her lawyer were killed, per Britannica. A persistent urban legend claimed she was decapitated — untrue, but fueled by photos of her wig near the wreckage. Three of her children, including a three-year-old Mariska, survived in the back seat with only minor injuries. The crash is often cited as a catalyst for the underride guards now bolted beneath commercial trucks nationwide, per J.D. Power, a small but lasting regulatory footnote to a very public tragedy.

Hargitay has said the film grew out of a lifelong effort to understand a mother she barely got to know, and that she made it in part at the urging of Gloria Steinem. That the documentary’s win landed the same week she stepped into hosting duties on television’s biggest night gave the Mansfield family story an unusually full-circle moment — a daughter who spent much of her career distancing herself from her mother’s tabloid image now getting recognized by the industry for putting that image into honest context.