The Berlin-born performer had a gift for languages that took her to Hollywood, landing roles alongside Peter Sellers, Dick Van Dyke and Paul Newman
Elke Sommer, the prolific German star of the Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark, early 70s Agatha Christie adaptation And Then there Were None, and British sex comedy Carry on Behind, has died aged 85. Bild magazine reported that Sommer died in Los Angeles of heart failure.
German-born Sommer, whose best-known film roles were in the 1960s and 70s, was one of the wave of European performers who crossed over to Hollywood and English-language cinema with considerable success, following the postwar emergence of European new wave cinema. Sommer was one of the few German actors to make waves at the time, as Hollywood made much of her bombshell image.
Born Elke Schletz in 1940 in Berlin, the daughter of a Protestant pastor, she was evacuated with her family to Bavaria during the war. Intending to work as an interpreter, she was spotted by celebrated Italian director Vittorio De Sica after winning a beauty contest on a trip to Italy in 1958, and subsequently offered roles in a string of Italian comedy films. She crossed back into more serious work with the West German drama The Death Ship, opposite Horst Buchholz (who would go on to appear in cowboy classic The Magnificent Seven).
With her gift for languages, Sommer made her first film in English, the 1961 British comedy Don’t Bother to Knock, opposite Richard Todd, and was billed as one of the “six most exciting women in the world” alongside Melina Mercouri, Jeanne Moreau and Romy Schneider in Carl Foreman’s 1963 war fable, The Victors. Sommer’s Hollywood breakthrough arrived in the same year, with The Prize; she was cast as Paul Newman’s lover in an adaptation of Irving Wallace’s hit novel, for which she was a joint winner of a most promising newcomer Golden Globe.
Sommer’s Hollywood career then took off with A Shot in the Dark, in which she leaned heavily into her “sexpot” image as a maid suspected of a series of murders in the sequel to The Pink Panther, starring Peter Sellers. Following its success, Sommer appeared in a string of high profile Hollywood films, including The Art of Love with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, The Oscar with Stephen Boyd, and the Bob Hope comedy Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! In 1968, she achieved leading actor status with The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, a comedy about an East German athlete who pole-vaults over the Berlin Wall.
In the 1970s, Sommer appeared in two cult horror films by Mario Bava, Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil, and sex comedies Percy and Percy’s Progress for British director Ralph Thomas. She followed these with two high-profile British films: as secretary Vera Clyde in And Then There Were None in 1974, adapted from Christie’s hit novel, and a year later, Carry on Behind, the 27th in the Carry On series.
After another Sellers film, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Ralph Thomas’s heist film A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, Sommer scaled back her screen appearances and concentrated on painting. In the mid-1980s, she also became embroiled in a long-running feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor after they appeared together on TV show Circus of the Stars; Sommer was ultimately awarded $3.3m in damages for defamation.
Sommer was married twice, to writer Joe Hyams from 1964 until 1981, and hotelier Wolf Walther from 1993 until his death in 2026.
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