When a chestnut-haired starlet named Jayne Mansfield first arrived in Hollywood in 1954, a casting executive for Paramount Studios told her she was wasting what he termed her “obvious talents”—meaning her body. A single mother in her early 20s, Mansfield was game for anything that would get her foot in the door and allow her to eventually become a serious actor. So she dyed her hair the color of popcorn butter. She tightened her dresses to accentuate her buxom, hourglass physique. She affected a coquettish purr in her first acting roles and televised interviews, drawing each syllable out into an exasperated coo.Mansfield had grand creative ambitions, having been raised by a mother who enrolled her in singing, dancing, and music lessons as a child. But despite her other talents—she was also an accomplished pianist and violinist—her sexually suggestive persona became her meal ticket in a period when studios were itching to replicate the success of Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s resident bombshell. This experiment in engineering a star earned diminishing returns, and as Mansfield’s screen career waned in the 1960s, her image became more albatross than asset. Hollywood saw her as lacking any substance, thinking the costume of the atomic blonde was all she had to offer. By the time she died in 1967, from a car crash, at just 34, she found herself exiled to nightclub appearances. Taken at face value, Mansfield’s life might seem like the tragedy of a woman who struggled to break away from her reputation. The recently released HBO documentary My Mom Jayne, directed by her youngest daughter, the actor Mariska Hargitay—who was 3 when her mother died and would become a household name as the hard-boiled Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit—invites viewers to reconsider that framing. Although the film acknowledges the injustice of Mansfield’s unfulfilled artistic potential, it also dignifies Mansfield as both actor and mother. The result is an affectionate tribute to a woman often impugned as Monroe’s dime-store variant; it also doubles as a portrait of Hollywood’s studio system in a state of free fall. Mansfield was a shrewd navigator of the industry’s politics—until they changed so drastically that she could not keep pace with them.In 1954, the year of Mansfield’s Paramount screen test, Hollywood was in crisis. Theater attendance had plummeted by a full 50 percent from its zenith in 1946, when 90 million people had hit the movies every week. Television, still a technological novelty, provided convenient entertainment without the hassle of a car ride. The House Un-American Activities Committee had been busy sniffing out suspected Communists within Hollywood’s ranks, thereby encouraging a conformist monoculture of directors, screenwriters, and performers who behaved themselves.These accumulating pressures led Hollywood to a moment of existential desperation—which had unfortunate consequences for female actors. The “woman’s films” that had once been popular, providing actors such as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis with meaty dramatic material, lost favor to testosterone-heavy films. Throughout the 1950s, the mold of female stardom became more homogenized. The industry still abided by the Hays Code—a series of censorious enforcements that forbade films from depicting forms of “sex perversion”—which began to feel illogical as filmmakers grew eager to pursue more rebellious material. This created an uneasy ecosystem in which studios promoted female stars, such as Monroe and Doris Day, who seemed “all about sex, but without sex,” as the film critic Molly Haskell contended in her groundbreaking 1974 study, From Reverence to Rape.Those conditions gave a young woman like Vera Jayne Palmer, as Mansfield was born in 1933, a narrow path to thrive on screen. After marrying and bearing her first child in her teens, Mansfield—keeping her first husband’s surname even after their divorce—took acting classes and migrated to Hollywood. She patched together an income through modeling, teaching dancing, and even selling candy outside a theater until her persistence got her proper attention from an agent.Mansfield would spend the following years acquitting herself well in B movies and supporting parts in big-ticket studio fare (along with a detour to Broadway in 1955, when she was just 22) before the director Frank Tashlin immortalized the Mansfield persona in a pair of comedies, The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. These films, with their candy-hued Technicolor canvases, were monuments to Mansfield’s charisma and comic flair. Playing two similar roles—a reluctant singing star in the former, a fluttery movie goddess in the latter—she took the Monroe archetype to its most parodic end point, flouncing about in fabulous stoles and bedazzled dresses while delivering each line as if it were wrapped in quotation marks.[Read: The bittersweet lessons of Law & Order: SVU]In real life, too, Mansfield showcased a refreshing willingness to laugh at herself. She made herself a fixture of Hollywood’s gossip pages and fan magazines, and had no compunction about strategically exploiting her own “pin-up publicity,” as she called it. “I use it as a means to an end,” Mansfield said to the television host Joyce Davidson. “I don’t know if I should say I liked it. But I felt that it would do me some good, being put into a position where I could project myself to what I really wanted to attain.”What she wanted to attain, My Mom Jayne asserts, was respect. “She just had that desire to be a serious actress,” her eldest daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield, says early in the film. “And she was totally determined to do that.” The Wayward Bus, from 1957, gave her a fair shake. Scaled-down and somber with its black-and-white palette, the drama was a departure from Mansfield’s comedies. She would tame her signature squeak in order to play Camille, an exotic dancer haunted by her stained reputation, and whose personal life is fodder for tabloids.Camille’s desperation for a life where men will respect her for who she is, rather than her physical endowments, is moving, and Mansfield makes the viewer root for her character to find happiness even when she fears it might evade her. The film, perhaps her finest dramatic hour, suggests an affecting presence whose capabilities were underutilized by short-sighted producers. “Why didn’t she do more of those roles?” Hargitay asks her sister after a scene from The Wayward Bus is shown, to which Jayne Marie responds bluntly: “Because the parts didn’t come in.”As the 1950s came to a close, Mansfield found herself in the same rut as so many other Hollywood blondes. Today, many film scholars tend to group Mansfield with Sheree North and Mamie Van Doren, two other studio products groomed carefully to mimic the Monroe template. Only occasionally were such women able to escape the typecasting of studio brass. Even Monroe herself had dramatic aspirations that a mere few films—namely her swan song, 1961’s The Misfits—gave her the chance to realize.[Read: America’s favorite Marilyn Monroe cliché]In My Mom Jayne’s telling, Monroe’s death in 1962 registered as a wake-up call for Mansfield, who began to fear that she would be forever doomed to cheesecake roles—that the “whole blonde persona was a box,” as Jayne Marie remarks. This initiated a conscious attempt to change her image: “I’ve been someone else for a few years,” Mansfield said to the talk-show host Jack Paar that year. “And I’m ready to be myself.” But press skepticism followed, as did box-office flops. Her brand of studied, bashful flightiness began to seem more passé than winkingly subversive. “In the fifties, Jayne was a demonstration of what to do and how to do it, when female sexuality was a come-on, a taste, a broken promise,” Martha Saxton observed in her book Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties. “Take a good look, she said, but don’t touch.” In the 1960s, a decade with newfound openness toward sex, her evasions had less mileage.It would be wishful thinking to assume that Mansfield fared much better in 1970s American cinema. The Hays Code ended in ’68, but despite the forward strides of the American movie industry, Hollywood could remain an unkind place for women. In a decade when Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Al Pacino got the lion’s share of audience attention, Barbra Streisand was the only woman to maintain a steady place on the “Top Ten Money Making Stars” poll, one of the industry’s barometers for measuring an actor’s drawing power.Only in recent years has it become more common for once-dismissed female actors to enjoy gratifying second acts, which makes My Mom Jayne an ideal film for this moment. See Pamela Anderson’s acclaimed and sincere turn in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl as a working-class performer at a Las Vegas revue, cocooned by her own delusions of grandeur. A critical class that once may have sneered at Anderson’s perceived prestige grab instead welcomed her. Had she been born a few generations later, a performer like Mansfield may have had an easier time revising her reputation as a pinup. My Mom Jayne openly—and justly—laments that she seldom had the opportunity to do that.“The public pays money at the box office to see me a certain way,” Mansfield once told Groucho Marx. “So I think it’s just all part of the role I’m playing as an actress.” She understood the nature of the game she was playing while knowing, deep down, that its rules were fundamentally unfair. My Mom Jayne positions her as less a hapless victim of Hollywood circumstance than a savvy operator who gave the industry exactly what it asked of her, even if she wanted more than it could grant her in return.