Almost 60 years after her movie star mother died in a car crash, Law & Order SUV star Mariska Hargitay has revealed in a new documentary that she was left behind inside the wrecked car.

Hargitay, 61, was just three when her mother Jayne Mansfield died in the crash that left young Mariska injured.

But now it has been revealed that she was actually left behind in the wreckage and was only saved after her older brother raised the alarm.

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Mansfield was being driven between celebrity appearances on June 29, 1967, by a driver, Ronald B Harrison. Also in the car was her boyfriend Sam Brody, her two dogs and three children, Mariska, Mickey, eight, and Zoltan, six.

Just after 2am, the driver of the car ran up the back of a slow-moving trailer truck that had slowed down due to fog from a vehicle that was spraying for mosquitoes.

The force of the collision killed Mansfield, 36, her boyfriend and the driver.

The three children, who were asleep in the backseat when the accident happened, survived.

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Now, it has been revealed in Hargitay’s documentary, My Mom Jayne, per People, that when passersby removed the children from the wreckage and placed them in their own car, they initially missed Mariska.

It was Zoltan who woke up in the stranger’s car, looked around and realised his little sister wasn’t there.

When he asked where she was, the good Samaritans went back to the wreck to search for her and found her lodged under the passenger seat with a head injury, according to her stepmother, Ellen Hargitay.

Hargitay was left with a zigzag scar down one side of her head.

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During the documentary, Zoltan also wondered if his mother would have survived had she not climbed into the front seat due to an argument with her boyfriend.

“I often think about why she didn’t just stay in the backseat with us?” he said in the film.

“But I remember her comforting me, telling me I was going to be fine.

“Twenty minutes later, half an hour, I heard her scream so loud, and that was it.”

Their elder brother Mickey also recalled in the film waking up in a car covered in blood and at first thinking the blonde woman who helped rescue them was his mother.

Following their mother’s death, the three children went to live full-time with Mickey Hargitay, a former Mr Universe to whom Mansfield was previously married.

But Mariska revealed last month that she had known for the past three decades that her biological father was Italian entertainer Nelson Sardelli, with whom her mother had an affair while separated from Hargitay.

She said she first suspected he was her father after seeing a photo of him and later met with him, but the man who raised her, Mickey Hargitay, became upset when she brought it up so she never mentioned it again.

Hargitay died of cancer in 2006.

Sardelli, now aged in his 90s, accompanied his daughter to the New York premiere of the film.

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Hargitay told People she was pleased to finally be able to tell her story.

My Mom Jayne will be available on Max from June 27.

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