Mariska Magdolna Hargitay was born on January 23, 1964, in Santa Monica, California. She appeared few times on the nighttime soap Falcon Crest (1981). She also appeared in the hit film Leaving Las Vegas (1995), credited as ‘Hooker at the bar’, and in the flop film Lake Placid (1999) as Myra Okubo. Her recurring role on the top-rated show ER (1994) in 1998 gave her career enough of a jolt to land her the starring role of Det.

Olivia Benson in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999), the first spin off from the excellent franchise of Law & Order (1990). The hour-long show deals with sex crimes and the detectives who solve these cases. Mariska played Olivia as a tough, compassionate detective, who did action scenes and her own stunt work. She reaped the rewards from the hit TV show, after struggling and studying her craft for fifteen years.

She became the highest paid actress on television, and she won Emmy and Golden Globe awards for her performance. The show also changed her personal life, since she met her husband actor Peter Hermann on the set and married him on August 28, 2004. That same year, she appeared in the television movie Plain Truth (2004), in which she played attorney Ellie Harrison. Mariska became an activist, when fans of her show who were abused, would write to her, and she founded a non-profit organization called “Joyful Heart Foundation” to help “survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse.”

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At the age of 3, Mariska was involved in a serious car accident with her two brothers and her mother. She and her brothers suffered minor injuries but her mother and her boyfriend didn’t survive.

Mariska Hargitay is fluent in 5 languages, including English she can speak Spanish, Italian, French and Hungarian. In December 2008, she suffered a mishap while performing a stunt at the set of SVU. Due to fall, her lung partially collapsed, which required a surgery. She continued to experience chest pain afterwards. Hargitay has founded the Joyful Foundation. She is also the president of the charity that works to support the survivors of child abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault. In 2008, the prestigious People magazine included her in the list of “Hundred Most Beautiful People in the World.”

In November 2013, she was honored with the star on Hollywood Walk of Fame. Incidentally, her star was placed next to the one, her mother Jayne Mansfield had received.

[on dealing with sl offences] Society continues to misplace blame and shame on survivors – both women and men – on college campuses and everywhere else. That has to end. We must confront the myths and excuses that help perpetuate sl assault. We must speak out about these issues boldly and often, because criminals thrive when we are silent, when we are reluctant to engage, when we insist that these issues are too murky to sort out.

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