Mariska Hargitay honored her late mother, Jayne Mansfield, on what would have been her 90th birthday on April 19.
The “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” star shared a photo to Instagram of her mom smiling and leaning over a cake at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in 1956.
“Happy birthday Mama. We live to love you more each day,” Hargitay, 59, wrote in the caption.
Mansfield was a legendary Hollywood bombshell known for her roles in films throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, including “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” and “Too Hot to Handle.” Hargitay posted a scene from “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” featuring her mother to her Instagram story April 19.
Mansfield died in a car accident at age 34 in 1967, when Hargitay was 3.
Hargitay is one of three children Mansfield shared with her second husband, actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.
The “Law & Order” star has opened up in the past about how losing her mother so early in life shaped her.
“I think I learned about crisis very young, and I learned very young that s--- happens and there’s no guarantees, and we keep going. And then we transform it,” she told Glamour in 2021. “That’s been kind of my superpower, and the gift of having trauma early in life.”
She added that she was in a “frozen place” for much of her childhood as she tried to survive and process her grief.
“My life has been a process of unpeeling the layers and trust and trusting again,” she said.
Hargitay has paid tribute to her mother in various touching ways over the years, including when she channeled her mom’s bold spirit in a fierce runway walk.
She also wore hot pink on the red carpet when she was named one of Glamour’s Women of the Year in 2021, to honor Mansfield’s known fondness for the rosy hue.
While Mansfield was no doubt an icon of Hollywood glamour, Hargitay shared in her Glamour Women of the Year acceptance speech that Mansfield’s beauty was so much more than skin deep.
“We have many pictures of her in our house, and my God, she is just so unbelievably glamorous,” she said. “But I think that her glamour, her real glamour, the glamour of her luminous, tender, searching heart, was deeper and more beautiful than she ever knew.”