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Quick Facts
- NAME: Jayne Mansfield
- OCCUPATION: Film Actress, Theater Actress, Television Actress, Pin-up
- BIRTH DATE: April 19, 1933
- DEATH DATE: June 29, 1967
- PLACE OF BIRTH: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
- PLACE OF DEATH: U.S. Highway 90 near Slidell, Louisiana
- Originally: Vera Jayne Palmer
Best Known For
Jayne Mansfield was one of the leading blond sex symbols of 1950s Hollywood. She died in a car accident at the age of 34.
Jayne Mansfield. (2012). Biography.com. Retrieved 11:11, May 26, 2012 from http://www.biography.com/people/jayne-mansfield-9397804
Jayne Mansfield [Internet]. 2012. http://www.biography.com/people/jayne-mansfield-9397804, May 26
" Jayne Mansfield." 2012. Biography.com 26 May 2012, 11:11 http://www.biography.com/people/jayne-mansfield-9397804
' Jayne Mansfield', Biography.com,(2012) http://www.biography.com/people/jayne-mansfield-9397804 [accessed May 26, 2012]
" Jayne Mansfield," Biography.com, http://www.biography.com/people/jayne-mansfield-9397804 (accessed May 26, 2012).
Jayne Mansfield [Internet]. Biography.com; 2012 [cited 2012 May 26]. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/jayne-mansfield-9397804.
Jayne Mansfield, http://www.biography.com/people/jayne-mansfield-9397804 (last visited May 26, 2012).
Jayne Mansfield, http://www.biography.com/people/jayne-mansfield-9397804 (last visited May 26, 2012).
Synopsis
Born Vera Jayne Palmer in 1933, Jayne Mansfield was one of the leading symbols of the 1950s. She worked on Broadway and Hollywood, always emphasizing her hourglass figure and platinum-blond hair. Although her career was short lived, she had several box-office hits, was married three times and divorced twice, the mother of five and a Playboy playmate. She died in a car accident at the age of 34.
Early Life
Born as Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Jayne Mansfield's father, Herbert Palmer, was an attorney, and her mother, Vera Palmer, was a retired schoolteacher. Mansfield endured a childhood tragedy at the age of three, when her father passed away from a heart attack at the age of 30. Her father's death came as a complete shock; he had attended a routine physical the very morning of his death and was proclaimed entirely healthy. Reflecting back on the tragedy, Mansfield 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." Mansfield's mother returned to teaching to support the family, and in 1939, with her daughter's approval, she married an engineer named Harry Peers and they moved with him to Dallas, Texas.
In Dallas, Mansfield enjoyed a typical middle class upbringing. She was a caring and naïve child, and accounts of her youth are full of endearing anecdotes illustrating these traits. When Mansfield learned that a classmate of hers did not own a winter coat because her family had fallen upon hard times, she traded the girl her own coat for an old baby bottle. One day, her Sunday school teacher told Mansfield that God was always with her, and that night she fell out of bed several times "making room for God."
Mansfield was also a natural born performer. She took voice, dance and violin lessons and would frequently stand out in her driveway playing her violin for passersby on the sidewalk. Mansfield's obsession with Hollywood stars was born at the age of 13, when she and her mother took a vacation to Los Angeles and she got the autographs of radio stars Dennis Day and Harold Peary at a Hollywood restaurant. Upon returning to their table, she declared to her mother, "one day some other young girl is going to make her way across this room and ask for my autograph."
Jayne Mansfield was 16 years old when she met a boy named Paul Mansfield at a Christmas party and immediately fell in love. They married just months later, in May of 1950, a few weeks before Mansfield graduated from Highland Park High School in Dallas. Later that year, she gave birth to a daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield. While her husband served in the Korean War, Mansfield studied drama at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and appeared in local plays, including a production of Death of a Salesman with the Knox Street Players. In 1954, after Paul Mansfield returned from the war, Mansfield convinced him to move with her to Los Angeles
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