Jayne Mansfield

Jayne Mansfield

Jayne Mansfield was an American film, theater, and television actress. She enjoyed success in the role of fictional actress Rita Marlowe in the 1955–1956 Broadway version and the 1957 film version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Her other major movie performances were in The Girl Can’t Help It, The Wayward Bus, and Too Hot to Handle. She died in an automobile accident in Eastern New Orleans on June 29, 1967, at the age of 34.

About Jayne Mansfield in brief

Summary Jayne MansfieldJayne Mansfield was an American film, theater, and television actress. She was also a singer and nightclub entertainer as well as one of the early Playboy Playmates. She enjoyed success in the role of fictional actress Rita Marlowe in the 1955–1956 Broadway version and the 1957 film version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Her other major movie performances were in The Girl Can’t Help It, The Wayward Bus, and Too Hot to Handle. Mansfield took her professional name from her first husband, public relations professional Paul Mansfield. She died in an automobile accident in Eastern New Orleans on June 29, 1967, at the age of 34. Her film career was short-lived, but she had several box-office successes and won a Theatre World Award and a Golden Globe. She married and divorced three times and had five children. She allegedly intimately involved with numerous men, including Robert and John F. Kennedy, her attorney Samuel S. Brody, and Las Vegas entertainer Nelson Sardelli. She inherited more than USD 90,000 from her maternal grandfather Thomas and more thanUSD 36,000 in 1958. As a child she wanted to be a Hollywood star like Shirley Temple. She entered the Miss California contest but was forced to resign after Paul found out. She then moved to Austin, Texas, with her husband, and studied dramatics at the University of Texas at Austin. Jayne won several beauty contests, including Miss Photoflash, Miss Magnesium, Miss Fire Prevention Week, and Miss Roquefort Cheese.

She later rejected Miss Prime Rib because it was believed it didn’t sound right, and she later said it was because she believed it was just because she was a woman. She had a daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield, who was born on April 19, 1933, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She spent her early childhood in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where her father was an attorney practicing with future New Jersey governor Robert B. Meyner. In 1936, her father died of a heart attack. In 1939 her mother married sales engineer Harry Lawrence Peers, and the family moved to Dallas, Texas. In 1952, while she and her husband participated in small-theater productions of The Demon of Slaves and Anything Goes, he left for Camp Gordon, Georgia. In 1953, she moved back to Dallas and attended a summer semester at UCLA. For several months was a student of actor Baruch Lumet, father of director Sidney Lumet and founder of the Dallas Institute of Performing Arts. Lumet would eventually help Jayne get her first screen test at Paramount in April 1954. She also worked as a nude art model, selling books door-to-door, and working as a receptionist at a dance studio. In 1958, she became a part-time model at the Blue Book Model Agency, selling popcorn at the Stanley Theatre. She went on to appear in several other odd jobs, including at the Warner Theatre.