Jayne Mansfield

1933–1967

A provocateur of her time, actor Jayne Mansfield gained fame and pin-up status during the 1950s and was offered roles in several movies such as Kiss Them for Me, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, and It Takes a Thief. She experienced a career lull in the 1960s, though she did continue to act in small roles on film and stage. Mansfield died in a horrific car accident on June 29, 1967, at age 34.

FULL NAME: Vera Jayne Mansfield
BORN: April 19, 1933
DIED: June 29, 1967
BIRTHPLACE: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
SPOUSES: Paul Mansfield (1950–1958), Mickey Hargitay (1958–1963), Matt Cimber (1964–1966)
CHILDREN: Jayne, Mickey Jr., Zoltan, Mariska Hargitay, and Antonio
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aries

Jayne Mansfield was born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her father, Herbert, was an attorney and musician; her mother, Vera, had previously worked as a schoolteacher.

Jayne endured a childhood tragedy at the age of 3 when her father died of a heart attack while driving with the family. Reflecting back on the tragedy, she later said, “Something went out of my life... My earliest memories are the best. I always try to remember the good times when Daddy was alive.”

Vera returned to teaching to support herself and young Jayne. In 1939, the widow remarried a sales engineer named Harry Peers. Jayne and her mother adopted the Peers surname, and the family moved to Dallas.

Jayne enjoyed a middle-class upbringing and was later reported to be an above-average student with an aptitude for languages under the oversight of her strict mother. The girl was also a natural-born performer. She took voice, dance, and violin lessons and frequently played violin in the family’s driveway for passersby on the sidewalk.

The bright girl was 16 years old when she met 20-year-old Paul Mansfield at a Christmas party and immediately fell for him. They married clandestinely in January 1950, a few months before the newly minted Jayne Mansfield graduated from Highland Park High School. Later that year, she gave birth to their daughter.

Whereas many women at the time would have become homemakers, the young mother took the unusual step of continuing her education. Mansfield attended Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas in Austin, focusing on drama and appearing in local plays, including a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In 1954, after Paul returned from the Korean War, Mansfield convinced him to move with her to Los Angeles so she could pursue her dream of becoming a movie star.

Mansfield’s first years in Hollywood initially brought disappointment. She had unsuccessful auditions for Paramount and Warner Bros. and had to take a job selling candy at a movie theater. She also sought out modeling work, not always successfully either. At a professional photoshoot for an advertisement for General Electric, she was cropped out of the picture because she looked “too sexy” for 1954 audiences, according to photographer Gene Lester. Still, Mansfield was able to make her TV debut that year with an appearance in the Lux Video Theatre series.

As Mansfield struggled to break into show business, her marriage suffered. In 1955, she and Paul split ways, though she opted to keep his last name. That same year, she made her big-screen debut via small parts in a trio of 1955 films: Pete Kelly’s Blues, Hell on Frisco Bay, and Illegal.

Mansfield proved to have a no-holds-barred approach for self-promotion, and she took steps to distinguish herself from the many curvy blonde starlets attempting to make it big in Hollywood at the time. The model and actor made pink her trademark color; she wore pink, drove a pink car, and eventually bought a house decked out in pink that was dubbed “the pink palace.”

When Mansfield was just starting to make a name for herself in the mid-’50s, she garnered nationwide publicity when, attending a media gathering related to Jane Russell’s movie Underwater in Florida, Mansfield’s top mysteriously fell off in a pool flanked by numerous journalists. Some consider it the original wardrobe malfunction. From then on, as one journalist put it, Mansfield “suffered so many on-stage strap and zipper mishaps that nudity was, for her, a professional hazard.”

Shortly after the Underwater incident, Mansfield signed a contract in 1955 with Warner Bros. and later that year landed the role of Rita Marlowe in the hit Broadway production Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which ran for 444 shows. She also starred in the play’s 1957 movie adaptation. Those performances finally established Mansfield as a marquis actor, and she went on to be featured in such movies as Kiss Them For Me (1957) with co-star Cary Grant, The Wayward Bus (1957), The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958), and It Takes a Thief (1960).

Nevertheless, many more people saw her photographs than her movies. In just nine months, from September 1956 to May 1957, Mansfield reportedly appeared in an astonishing 2,500 newspaper photos. She also modeled for the newly minted Playboy magazine at various times during the 1950s. Mansfield thus joined the era’s pantheon of blonde sex symbols who evoked Marilyn Monroe. (Monroe was in fact quite dismayed about the way in which Mansfield seemed to parody her image, at one point wishing that she could sue the actor.)

After seeing her career fizzle out domestically and working on European films, Mansfield again made headlines in 1963 by becoming the first American actor to appear nude in a major motion picture. The movie, Promises! Promises!, generated significant buzz, but it failed to reignite her film career. Mansfield made only a handful more films, including Panic Button (1964), The Fat Spy (1966), and Single Room Furnished (1966).

In the later years of her career, Mansfield also returned to the stage with an acclaimed turn in Bus Stop and developed into a successful Vegas headliner and nightclub performer. Her act combined song, comedy, and impromptu banter with the audience.

Mansfield was married three times and had five children (two daughters and three sons).

Her first marriage was to Paul Mansfield. Still in high school at the time, the aspiring actor took her husband’s last name after their secret wedding in January 1950. Later that year, Jayne gave birth to their daughter, Jayne Marie.

Five years later, Mansfield and her husband separated. From then on, her personal life followed a turbulent and highly publicized course that often overshadowed her acting career. The former couple’s divorce was finalized in 1958.

Just days after the ink dried on her first divorce, Mansfield married bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay. He had been named the 1955 Mr. Universe and worked as one of Mae West’s musclemen. Over the years, the couple added three children—Mickey Jr., Zoltan, and Mariska—to their family, as they co-starred in the 1960 Italian film The Loves of Hercules (as known as Hercules vs. the Hydra) and the 1963 movie Promises! Promises!, among other projects.

However, the relationship between Mansfield and Hargitay was a tumultuous one. They divorced in 1963 but briefly reconciled before their daughter was born in January 1964. (Today, Mariska Hargitay is also an actor, best known for her decades-long run as Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Mariska revealed in 2025 that her biological father is actually entertainer Nelson Sardelli. She first learned the truth about her dad at age 25.)

Mansfield wasn’t single for long in the wake of her second divorce. Later in 1964, she married director Matt Cimber in Mexico. The two had previously worked together on a Broadway production of Bus Stop. The couple had a son, Antonio, before also parting ways in 1966.

Mansfield later became involved in a rocky, reputedly abusive relationship with Sam Brody, the attorney she hired to assist with her divorce proceedings.

On June 29, 1967, Mansfield was traveling from Biloxi, Mississippi, where she had given a nightclub performance, to New Orleans for a morning TV interview. She was sitting in the front of a Buick Electra alongside her boyfriend Sam Brody and a hired driver. In the back seat were Mansfield and her ex-husband Mickey Hargitay’s three children: Mickey Jr., Zoltan, and Mariska.

Sometime after 2 a.m., the car was rounding a curve on I-90 near Slidell, Louisiana, when it crashed into and went under a slowed tractor-trailer believed to be obscured by pesticide spray. All three front seat passengers died. Mansfield was only 34 years old at the time of the tragic accident. Her children suffered injuries but survived the crash.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration subsequently regulated that all tractor-trailers have a rear under guard installed, now often known as the Mansfield bar.

• I don’t really think I am the most beautiful woman in the world at all. If I can create some illusion to that effect, and it seems I have, then that is what spells success to me.
• Momma was the important woman in our home. She never let me forget that she was boss. I was always in the shadow. Every time I tried to step out on my own, I was in trouble with her.

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