Mariska Hargitay lost her mother when she was very young.
Jayne Mansfield, an icon of 1950s cinema, died when Hargitay was barely beginning to build her own memories. So when the 62-year-old actress arrived at the 2026 Emmys with her 15-year-old daughter Amaya, both wearing identical red sequin-and-feather dresses inspired by the look Mansfield wore in “The Girl Can’t Help It”, it wasn’t just a fashion whim. It was a way of saying: you’re still here, in us.
Amaya joined Hargitay and her husband Peter Hermann’s family in 2011, in a birth where they were both present from the very first minute. “Basically, I took Amaya out of the womb”, Hargitay once said, recalling how she embraced the girl’s biological mother as if they were one family. That same spirit—the spirit of building bonds beyond blood—is what brought them to the red carpet: three generations of women, united by a red dress and a story that refuses to disappear.
