Elke Sommer, the prolific German star of the Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark, the early ’70s Agatha Christie adaptation And Then There Were None and the British sex comedy Carry on Behind, has died at the age of 85. Bild magazine reported that Sommer died in Los Angeles of heart failure.
German-born Sommer, whose best-known film roles date from the 1960s and 1970s, was part of the wave of European artists who crossed over from Hollywood and English-speaking cinema with considerable success, following the post-war emergence of European New Wave cinema. Sommer was one of the few German actors making waves at the time, with Hollywood making much of his 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 a performer, she was spotted by the famous Italian director Vittorio De Sica after winning a beauty contest during a trip to Italy in 1958, and was subsequently offered roles in a series of Italian comedy films. She returned to more serious work with the West German drama The Death Ship, alongside Horst Buchholz (who would later appear in the cowboy classic The Magnificent Seven).
With her gift for languages, Sommer directed her first English-language film, the 1961 British comedy Don’t Bother to Knock, alongside 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 came the same year, with The Prize; she was cast as Paul Newman’s lover in an adaptation of Irving Wallace’s best-selling novel, for which she was co-winner of the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer.
Sommer’s Hollywood career then took off with A Shot in the Dark, in which she leaned heavily on her “sexpot” image as a maid suspected of a series of murders in the sequel to The Pink Panther, starring Peter Sellers. Following his 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 actress status with Paula Schultz’s Bad Dreams, a comedy about an East German athlete who pole vaults over the Berlin Wall.
In the 1970s, Sommer appeared in two cult Mario Bava horror films, Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil, as well as the sex comedies Percy and Percy’s Progress by British director Ralph Thomas. She followed them with two high-profile British films: as secretary Vera Clyde in 1974’s And Then There Were None, adapted from Christie’s best-selling novel, and a year later, Carry on Behind, the 27th in the Carry On series.
After another Sellers film, The Prisoner of Zenda, and the Ralph Thomas heist film A Nightingale Blood in Berkeley Square, Sommer reduced her screen appearances and concentrated on painting. In the mid-1980s, she also found herself embroiled in a long-running feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor after their appearance together on the television show Circus of the Stars; Sommer was ultimately awarded $3.3 million in damages for defamation.
Sommer was married twice, to writer Joe Hyams from 1964 to 1981 and hotelier Wolf Walther from 1993 until his death in 2026.
Gn entert
