Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theshmit.org.

This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley. For more than two decades, Mariska Hargatay has held a singular place on American television,

as Olivia Benson on Law and Order Special Victims Unit, the longest running character

in a prime time drama. She's become an emblem of justice and empathy, receiving thousands

of letters over the years from real-life survivors.

But behind the on-screen strength is a personal history Hargatay has never publicly told until now.

When she was just three years old, Hargatay was in the back seat of a car

when her mother, Hollywood actress Jane Mansfield, died in a tragic accident.

Though she and her siblings survived, Hargatay has no memory of the crash and never had the chance to truly know her mother.

In her place stood a public image, the platinum blonde, hypersexualized starlet, a persona that

felt disconnected from the woman Hargatay was told her mother was.

For years, she wrestled with that legacy, not sure how to embrace or escape it, choosing to

keep her distance as she searched for her own identity. But in her new documentary, My Mom, Jane,

Hargatay looks back at her mother's life, and along the way, she unearths a

complicated truth about her own identity, including her biological father. Though she was raised

believing actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargatay was her father, the full story is more layered,

and now she's ready to tell it.

Reclaiming my own story, that is what this is about for me.

I'd spent 35 years trying to hide that story to honor my dad.

But something that I've also realized is that sometimes keeping a secret doesn't honor anyone.

And it's taken me a long time to figure that out.

Hargajee does in this documentary what her fictional character, Olivia Benson, has asked of countless survivors on Law and Order. She tells

...