page_title: Jayne Mansfield in popular culture
section_title: Biographies
hierarchical_section_title: Jayne Mansfield in popular culture / Biographies
caption_attribution_description: Arriving at the 1991 Emmy Awards. NOTE: Permission granted to copy, publish, broadcast or post any of my photos, but please credit "photo by Alan Light" if you can. Thanks. Scanned from the original 35MM film negative.
context_page_description: Jayne Mansfield was an actress, singer, playmate and stage show performer who had an enormous impact on popular culture of the late 1950s despite her limited success in Hollywood. She has remained a well-known subject in popular culture ever since. During a period between 1956 and 1957, there were about 122,000 lines of copy and 2,500 photographs that appeared in newspapers. In an article on her in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Dennis Russel said that "Although many people have never seen her movies, Jayne Mansfield remains, long after her death, one of the most recognizable icons of 1950s celebrity culture." In the 2004 novel Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott, a National Book Award winning writer, the 1950s is referred to as "in those Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield days". R. L. Rutsky and Bill Osgerby has claimed that it was Mansfield along with Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot who made the bikini popular.
  M. Thomas Inge described Mansfield, Monroe and Jane Russell as personification of the bad girl in popular culture, as opposed to Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Natalie Wood personifying the good girl.
context_section_description: In 1980, a TV film was made on her life — The Jayne Mansfield Story — which was nominated for three Emmy Awards in the categories for hair, makeup and costume. In the film directed by Dick Lowry, Mansfield is played by Loni Anderson and her husband Mickey Hargitay is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. She was featured in the A&E Television Networks TV series Biography in an episode titled Jayne Mansfield: Blonde Ambition. The TV series won an Emmy Award in outstanding non-fiction TV series category in 2001. A&E again featured her life in another TV serial titled Dangerous Curves in 1999. In 1988, her story and archival footage was a part of TV documentary Hollywood Sex Symbols. The first film documentary on her, The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield, started with herself working in the film, but it was finished in 1968 after her death and had to make use of archival footage. Fans of trash documentaries made a cult out of this film.
  Numerous books has been written on her life and career. These include: Jayne Mansfield (May Mann; Pocket; 1974), Jayne Mansfield: A biography (May Mann; Abelard-Schuman; 1974), The tragic secret life of Jayne Mansfield (Raymond Strait; Regnery; 1974), Jayne Mansfield and the American fifties (Martha Saxton; Houghton Mifflin; 1975), Jayne Mansfield (Jean-Pierre Jackson; Edilig; 1984), Sexbomb: The Life and Death of Jayne Mansfield (Guus Luitjters, Gerard Timmer; Citadel; 1988), Here They Are Jayne Mansfield (Raymond Strait, S.P.I. Books; 1992), Jayne Mansfield Vs. Mamie Van Doren: Battle of the Blondes (A Pictorial History) (Alan Betrock; Shake Books; 1993), Jayne Mansfield: A Bio-Bibliography  (Jocelyn Faris; Greenwood Press; 1994), Man Enough to Be Woman (Jayne County, Rupert Smith; Serpent's Tail; 1996), Sex Lives of the Hollywood Goddesses 2 (Nigel Cawthorne; Prion; 2004), Diamonds to Dust: The Life and Death of Jayne Mansfield (Frank Ferruccio; Outskirts Press; 2007, and Did Success Spoil Jayne Mansfield?: Her Life in Pictures & Text (Frank Ferruccio; Outskirts Press; 2010).
  There are currently plans to make a new film of Mansfield's life, although little progress has been made.  Over the years several directors including Gus Van Sant, Brian DePalma and Catherine Hardwicke have expressed interest in making a biopic of Mansfield.  Universal is apparently planning a film and reportedly has a list of actresses and models being considered to play Mansfield, including Ashley Benson, Sienna Miller, Holly Madison, Kate Upton, Kelly Rohrbach, Marisa Miller, Dakota Blue Richards, Hailey Clauson, Holly Willoughby and Charlotte McKinney.
caption: Loni Anderson plays Mansfield in The Jayne Mansfield Story, which was nominated for three Emmy Awards
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