Post by Trublu on Jul 21, 2006 10:44:58 GMT -5
Caution: Contains some possible spoilers for season 8.
Copping it Sweet
When Mariska Hargitay ascended the podium last January to accept her Golden Globe for best actress in a drama series, she cried.
Not because it was the first time a lead actor had won a Globe - or even an Emmy - for a Law & Order series, but because she knew that her strong-willed Hungarian father, Mickey Hargitay, the one-time Mr Universe who was married to her mother, Jayne Mansfield, would be pleased.
"My father has been extremely instrumental in my life and my career and I attribute almost all my success to him," she says.
"He has been my rock and has told me ever since I was little that I could do whatever I wanted. All the times that I wanted to quit acting, he said, 'No you're not a quitter, you don't quit and if you want to be an actor, well, that's what you want to be'."
The 42-year-old actress was cast as Detective Olivia Benson in Law & Order: Special Victims Units in 1999. She had dabbled in movies. She was the hooker in the bar in the Nicolas Cage Oscar-winning film Leaving Las Vegas and first came to audience attention in her recurring role as Cynthia Hooper on ER. She had already been nominated for an Emmy last year for SVU and lost out to The West Wing's Alison Janney and had likewise failed to win at the SAGs (Screen Actors Guild awards). So she was understandably nervous about inviting her father to the Globes.
"I thought, I can't invite him to another awards ceremony where I lose!" she says. "So I was so happy that I won. But the joke was when my brothers called me up and they went, 'Marish, I'm so happy you won, but I'm even happier for Dad'.
"He's old school. He was a champion weightlifter and speed skater and for him there's only one winner. For me it was a prize in itself to be nominated."
At the ceremony a tearful Hargitay also thanked her mother, whom she barely knew. Mansfield, a would-be competitor to Marilyn Monroe's crown as the 50's sexy screen queen, had been living a somewhat reckless life at the time of her death. She was killed in an automobile accident in a car driven by her latest boyfriend, attorney Sam Brody, while her three children, Mariska, aged three, and her two elder brothers, Zoltan and Mickey Jr, were sitting in the back seat. The children were miraculously unharmed, though they were left without a mother. Hargitay eventually remarried and Mariska refers to the couple as her parents.
Now she is set to raise her own family with her husband of almost two years, actor Peter Hermann. She met him on the show where he plays attorney Trevor Langan. The couple welcomed their first child, a son, last month.
"We dated for two years so he knew what he was getting into," she says, laughing raucously, "and he decided to do it anyway. Thank God! Lucky me! My life obviously will change and fortunately for me I have achieved a lot of what I set out to do. But being a mother will be the most important thing I will ever do and I've known that since I was little, because not having my own mother and having this amazing father, I want to give so much to my child; that rock, that inspiration, that home strength."
If Hargitay sounds like the voice of authority, she is. She is a force of nature. Curvaceous, sturdily built with a wide-open, fresh-faced beauty and outgoing personality, she seems to have completely embodied her role as a no-nonsense cop dealing with sex crimes.
"Her own persona comes through loud and clear," says series creator Dick Wolf. "Cops love her. It's very funny. They watch her on TV and say it's very real. I mean, Mariska is the daughter of a movie star, and having grown up with it, has the least amount of vanity on screen. It's a huge gift because she'll do anything and she'll try anything."
What's it like being surrounded by men on the show? "I like it," Hargitay says, "because I fill a different space. I bring what no one else can bring. I mean, Chris (Christopher Meloni, her partner on the force) is such a great actor but he's very male, he's linear. He goes after something with a club like boys do, but I come around it this way (she waves her hands in a circular motion) to get through to somebody. You know, women do things differently, they can multi-task and they can outsmart people. Fortunately now on the show they allow me to use all of that, whereas in the beginning as a young detective I was surrounded by all that testosterone and feeling under pressure to join the team and do it the boys way. I needed a few years to get the confidence to go, Uh-uh, that's not how I do it. But clearly with the success of the show and the success of the character," she pauses, "I think my way works. Now Olivia's this lioness, this mama bear, who will figure it out and get it done. And that's exciting for me to play."
Even so Hargitay's fearlessness as an actor may soon be put to the test.
While last season it was the highly wired Meloni who loses it all the time, in season seven - on air now - it's Benson's turn. "He gets it back together and then I start to unravel," she says. Benson, it seems like Hargitay, wants to be a mother.
"They've set up this arc, so that in the show I've just finished, which features Benson and a girl, it was Benson as a mother. I've been so obsessed with muscling my way through these crimes and trying like a one-man show to change the world, but now I'm wondering: What am I doing with my life? Where is my life going? Am I ever going to be a mother? Can I be a mother? Am I too violent? She has so many questions, which I think is so interesting about the character, and of her being the product of rape."
It's probably no coincidence that Hargitay constantly refers to her character in the first person. She so embodies the person she plays, that it seeps into her own life and she has gladly allowed that to happen.
She has started a self-esteem website for young abused women (www.mariska.com) and a charity, The Joyful Heart Foundation, to help victims of rape overcome their trauma.
The latter involves taking a group of women to swim with dolphins in Hawaii, and the broad-shouldered Hargitay, a champion swimmer in her high school years, personally accompanied five women last summer, after taking a trial trip last year with rape crisis counsellors.
"This character has become such a role model. You know, I get different fan mail than other people. Other people get like, 'Oh, you're so pretty, I love your show', and I get, 'I was sexually assaulted, you changed my life'.
SVUbythehost.com
Wow... so this could be a major development year for Benson, when she returns...But I'm glad that Elliot will be balancing out. I don't think I can take anymore of crazy Elliot.
Copping it Sweet
When Mariska Hargitay ascended the podium last January to accept her Golden Globe for best actress in a drama series, she cried.
Not because it was the first time a lead actor had won a Globe - or even an Emmy - for a Law & Order series, but because she knew that her strong-willed Hungarian father, Mickey Hargitay, the one-time Mr Universe who was married to her mother, Jayne Mansfield, would be pleased.
"My father has been extremely instrumental in my life and my career and I attribute almost all my success to him," she says.
"He has been my rock and has told me ever since I was little that I could do whatever I wanted. All the times that I wanted to quit acting, he said, 'No you're not a quitter, you don't quit and if you want to be an actor, well, that's what you want to be'."
The 42-year-old actress was cast as Detective Olivia Benson in Law & Order: Special Victims Units in 1999. She had dabbled in movies. She was the hooker in the bar in the Nicolas Cage Oscar-winning film Leaving Las Vegas and first came to audience attention in her recurring role as Cynthia Hooper on ER. She had already been nominated for an Emmy last year for SVU and lost out to The West Wing's Alison Janney and had likewise failed to win at the SAGs (Screen Actors Guild awards). So she was understandably nervous about inviting her father to the Globes.
"I thought, I can't invite him to another awards ceremony where I lose!" she says. "So I was so happy that I won. But the joke was when my brothers called me up and they went, 'Marish, I'm so happy you won, but I'm even happier for Dad'.
"He's old school. He was a champion weightlifter and speed skater and for him there's only one winner. For me it was a prize in itself to be nominated."
At the ceremony a tearful Hargitay also thanked her mother, whom she barely knew. Mansfield, a would-be competitor to Marilyn Monroe's crown as the 50's sexy screen queen, had been living a somewhat reckless life at the time of her death. She was killed in an automobile accident in a car driven by her latest boyfriend, attorney Sam Brody, while her three children, Mariska, aged three, and her two elder brothers, Zoltan and Mickey Jr, were sitting in the back seat. The children were miraculously unharmed, though they were left without a mother. Hargitay eventually remarried and Mariska refers to the couple as her parents.
Now she is set to raise her own family with her husband of almost two years, actor Peter Hermann. She met him on the show where he plays attorney Trevor Langan. The couple welcomed their first child, a son, last month.
"We dated for two years so he knew what he was getting into," she says, laughing raucously, "and he decided to do it anyway. Thank God! Lucky me! My life obviously will change and fortunately for me I have achieved a lot of what I set out to do. But being a mother will be the most important thing I will ever do and I've known that since I was little, because not having my own mother and having this amazing father, I want to give so much to my child; that rock, that inspiration, that home strength."
If Hargitay sounds like the voice of authority, she is. She is a force of nature. Curvaceous, sturdily built with a wide-open, fresh-faced beauty and outgoing personality, she seems to have completely embodied her role as a no-nonsense cop dealing with sex crimes.
"Her own persona comes through loud and clear," says series creator Dick Wolf. "Cops love her. It's very funny. They watch her on TV and say it's very real. I mean, Mariska is the daughter of a movie star, and having grown up with it, has the least amount of vanity on screen. It's a huge gift because she'll do anything and she'll try anything."
What's it like being surrounded by men on the show? "I like it," Hargitay says, "because I fill a different space. I bring what no one else can bring. I mean, Chris (Christopher Meloni, her partner on the force) is such a great actor but he's very male, he's linear. He goes after something with a club like boys do, but I come around it this way (she waves her hands in a circular motion) to get through to somebody. You know, women do things differently, they can multi-task and they can outsmart people. Fortunately now on the show they allow me to use all of that, whereas in the beginning as a young detective I was surrounded by all that testosterone and feeling under pressure to join the team and do it the boys way. I needed a few years to get the confidence to go, Uh-uh, that's not how I do it. But clearly with the success of the show and the success of the character," she pauses, "I think my way works. Now Olivia's this lioness, this mama bear, who will figure it out and get it done. And that's exciting for me to play."
Even so Hargitay's fearlessness as an actor may soon be put to the test.
While last season it was the highly wired Meloni who loses it all the time, in season seven - on air now - it's Benson's turn. "He gets it back together and then I start to unravel," she says. Benson, it seems like Hargitay, wants to be a mother.
"They've set up this arc, so that in the show I've just finished, which features Benson and a girl, it was Benson as a mother. I've been so obsessed with muscling my way through these crimes and trying like a one-man show to change the world, but now I'm wondering: What am I doing with my life? Where is my life going? Am I ever going to be a mother? Can I be a mother? Am I too violent? She has so many questions, which I think is so interesting about the character, and of her being the product of rape."
It's probably no coincidence that Hargitay constantly refers to her character in the first person. She so embodies the person she plays, that it seeps into her own life and she has gladly allowed that to happen.
She has started a self-esteem website for young abused women (www.mariska.com) and a charity, The Joyful Heart Foundation, to help victims of rape overcome their trauma.
The latter involves taking a group of women to swim with dolphins in Hawaii, and the broad-shouldered Hargitay, a champion swimmer in her high school years, personally accompanied five women last summer, after taking a trial trip last year with rape crisis counsellors.
"This character has become such a role model. You know, I get different fan mail than other people. Other people get like, 'Oh, you're so pretty, I love your show', and I get, 'I was sexually assaulted, you changed my life'.
SVUbythehost.com
Wow... so this could be a major development year for Benson, when she returns...But I'm glad that Elliot will be balancing out. I don't think I can take anymore of crazy Elliot.