 Jayne Mansfield
Age: April 19th, 1933; Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA; Date of death: June 29th, 1967; Mansfield died in a car accident; Real name: Vera Jayne Palmer;
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 3, 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. 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. 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. 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.
Mansfield's first years in Hollywood brought mostly disappointment. She had several unsuccessful auditions for Paramount and Warner Bros. and had to take work selling candy at a movie theater. She also sought out modeling work, but at her first professional photo shoot, an advertisement for General Electric, she was cropped out of the picture because she looked "too sexy" for 1954 audiences.
Mansfield garnered her first nationwide publicity when, attending the premiere of Underwater in Florida, her top mysteriously fell off in sight of numerous journalists.
From then on, as one journalist put it, Mansfield "suffered so many on-stage strap and zipper mishaps that nudity was, for her, a professional hazard." In the later years of her career, Mansfield also returned to Broadway with an acclaimed turn in Bus Stop and developed into a successful nightclub performer with an act that combined song, comedy and impromptu banter with the audience. In 1958, she married the winner of the Mr. Universe Competition, Mickey Hargitay, and they had three children.
However, theirs was a tumultuous relationship, and in 1964 Mansfield married actor Matt Cimber in Mexico, even though she had not yet officially divorced Hargitay. Mansfield and Cimber had one child before also parting ways. For the rest of her life, Mansfield was involved in a rocky relationship with Sam Brody, the attorney she hired to assist with her divorce proceedings.
On June 29, 1967, Mansfield and Brody were driving home from a nightclub performance in Mississippi when they whipped around a dark curve and crashed into a slow-moving semi-truck, instantly killing both of them. Jayne Mansfield was only 34 years old and still in the prime of her career at the time of her shocking and tragic death.
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