Elke Sommer, the striking blonde bombshell of German descent who was a mainstay of 1960s Hollywood comedies and espionage movies including “The Prize” and “A Shot in the Dark,” has died. She was 85.
Sommer died at home in Bel Air, in Los Angeles, on Wednesday, her stepson Sebastian Walther told the German outlet Bild. The Los Angeles Police Department told The Associated Press that it responded to the death of an 85-year-old woman on Sommer’s block Wednesday night.
With expressive almond eyes and golden locks, often styled high in a beehive, Sommer worked with some of the biggest stars of the time, including Paul Newman in “The Prize,” Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther film “A Shot in the Dark,” James Garner and Dick Van Dyke in “The Art of Love,” Bob Hope in “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” and Dean Martin and Sharon Tate in “The Wrecking Crew.”
Sommer was born Elke Schletz in Berlin during World War II, on Nov. 5, 1940, though the family had to evacuate to the south in 1942. Her father, who died when she was 14, was a Protestant pastor.
She’d intended to study languages, but during a trip to Italy with her mother, Renata, in 1958, she caught the eye of someone in the Italian film industry who invited her to appear in her first film: “The Friend of the Jaguar.” Actor and filmmaker Vittorio De Sica noticed her too, and soon she was working nonstop throughout Europe, in Italy, Spain and England, with the newly adopted surname Sommer.
Her big Hollywood break came from producer Pandro S. Berman, who had seen her in a German drama that screened for the Golden Globes, and offered her a role in “The Prize” where she played chaperone and love interest to Newman’s Nobel Prize-winning character. In the trade publication Variety’s review, they wrote that Sommer, “hasn’t a very scintillating role, but has the looks to make that a secondary issue.” And it would win her the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.
In Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther sequel “A Shot in the Dark,” she played Maria Gambrelli, a maid framed for murder, who also sparks the romantic interest of Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau. She also posed for Playboy Magazine around that time, in photographs shot by her first husband Joe Hyams. They married in November 1964 and divorced in 1981.
In 1993 she married German hotelier Wolf Walther, who died in July at age 77.
Work slowed a bit in the 1970s, but she found jobs once again in Europe, appearing in the World War I film “Zeppelin” with Michael York as well as the Agatha Christie adaptation “And Then There Were None.” She also starred in two Mario Bava horrors. By the 1990s, she’d turned her focus to painting but she occasionally made appearances in films and television shows. She voiced Yzma in the German dub of “The Emperor’s New Groove.”
Sommer might also be remembered for a bizarre feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor, which originated during their appearance together on the show “Circus of the Stars” in 1984, where Sommer is said to have made comments about Gabor’s body.
In 1990, a war of words in the German media erupted when Gabor was quoted as saying that Sommer was broke, hung out in sleazy bars and earned a living by selling hand-knitted sweaters for $150. Gabor’s husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt was also quoted in another publication saying that Sommer was lying about her age, that she was nearly bald and looked 100 years old.
Sommer responded by filing a defamation of character and libel suit seeking $10 million. In 1993, a jury ordered Gabor and her husband to pay Sommer $3.3 million.
Though her looks often seemed to garner the most headlines, Sommer didn’t take the sex symbol designation too seriously, saying that it was essentially meaningless. She told Film Talk in a 2014 interview that some of her favorite actors, like Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, were also considered sex symbols. Besides, she said, she was always just acting the part.
“My whole life, I have been directed, I have been produced, I spoke the lines written for the character,” she said in the interview. “I was always playing, and the only thing I could bring was my energy. So what is it, this sex appeal? Why was I voted in this list of most sexy women? It’s not because of my looks or anything; it’s because of the energy.”
She did, however, believe in the importance of movie star glamour. In a television interview for the 1967 crime film “Deadlier than the Male,” she told the reporter that she is “very much for glamour on the screen.”
“I think movie stars, if I can use that word…should be something extraordinary and above normal, above average to the people who pay a lot of money to go see them,” Sommer said. “They shouldn’t be the girl next door, like the boy next door. They should be something very much above and people should say ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ when they see them.”
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