The car, a silver Buick Electra, hurtled down Highway 90 in Louisiana at speed exceeding 120km/h. At the wheel was college student Ron Harrison, who was earning some extra cash working for the Gus Stevens Supper Club in Biloxi, Mississippi.

It was after 2.30am, 50 years ago today on June 29, 1967, and Harrison was driving actress Jayne Mansfield from Biloxi to New Orleans, after she had performed a gig at the club.

Tragically he failed to see the truck stopped on the road in the path of their speeding car. The truck was obscured by a cloud of insecticide from a city council vehicle, spraying the swamps for mosquitoes.

The Buick ploughed into back of the truck, partly shearing off the roof and killing the three people in front seat — Harrison, Mansfield and her lawyer Samuel S. Brody. Mansfield’s four chihuahuas and her children, Miklos, Zoltan and Mariska, all survived with relatively minor injuries.

It was a sad and ignominious end to the star’s life. Mansfield was only 34 but while her death cut short her Hollywood career, it sparked a campaign for changes to road safety that has saved many lives since.

She was born Vera Jayne Palmer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1933. Her mother Vera was a schoolteacher but her lawyer father Herbert died when she was just three, suffering a heart attack while driving with Jayne and her mother in the car. Jayne and her mother narrowly escaped death. Vera married again in 1939 and the family moved to Dallas.

media_camera Jayne Mansfield in 1963.

From childhood Jayne yearned to be a performer, preferably a movie star, taking dance lessons and studying piano and violin. She was also good at languages and was said to have had an IQ of 163.

At 17 her acting career was temporarily set aside when she became pregnant and was forced to marry

Paul Mansfield in May 1950. Their daughter Jayne Marie was born in November. Both Paul and Jayne began taking acting lessons and appeared together in some stage productions, while Jayne also worked at other jobs, including modelling and posing for Playboy, and won beauty contests to raise her profile.

She was a pioneer of the wardrobe malfunction, orchestrated a series of sartorial “accidents” to garner publicity. This included popping out of bikinis and even infamously hanging out of her dress in front of shocked Hollywood siren Sophia Loren, a moment captured in a well-known photograph.

These sort of stunts, and the fact she was more famous and earning more than him, started to annoy her husband. The marriage broke down and they divorced in 1958. That same year she married former Mr Universe, Hungarian-born Mickey Hargitay, with whom she would have three children. By then her film career had taken off, thanks to an obsession with busty blondes fuelled partly by the popularity of Marilyn Monroe.

media_camera Jayne Mansfield sings title song in Too Hot To Handle (1959).

But it was a frustrating career. Despite her intelligence and having proved her acting chops on stage she was rarely offered decent film roles, often cast as stereotypical dumb blondes.

When demand for buxom blondes began to wane at the beginning of the 60s Mansfield found it harder to get roles.

Her publicity stunts were also beginning to work against her, the press tiring of her antics and producers unable to take her seriously as an actor.

She was sacked by 20th Century Fox in 1962 and began making B-grade films, taking guest spots on TV and performing in nightclubs to make ends meet. Things weren’t great in her personal life either. Her marriage to Hargitay ended in an acrimonious divorce in 1963, but produced three children. Mansfield married Italian-born film director Matt Cimber in 1964, but that marriage also ended badly in 1966.

She still hoped to make a comeback but that hope was shattered on Highway 90 in 1967.

The peeled back roof revealed a mop of blonde hair in the front of the car, causing some reporters to wrongly claim that Mansfield had been decapitated in the accident. In fact she died of a crushed skull.

The shock of Mansfield’s death resulted in trucks installing the “Mansfield Bar”, otherwise known as a rear underrun protector or underride guard, from the late 60s. It would later also become a standard feature of trucks in Australia.