By Fatma Younis
German-born actress Elke Sommer, known for her roles in the Pink Panther sequel A Shot in the Dark and the Agatha Christie adaptation And Then There Were None, has died at the age of 85. German magazine Bild reported that Sommer died in Los Angeles of heart failure.
Career spanned European and Hollywood cinema
Born Elke Schletz in Berlin in 1940, Sommer was evacuated to Bavaria during World War II. After winning a beauty contest in Italy in 1958, she was discovered by director Vittorio De Sica and began working in Italian comedies. Her gift for languages facilitated a move to English-language films, starting with the 1961 British comedy Don't Bother to Knock.
Sommer's Hollywood breakthrough came in 1963 with The Prize, where she played Paul Newman's lover and won a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer. She then starred opposite Peter Sellers in A Shot in the Dark (1964), cementing her "sexpot" image, and appeared in a string of high-profile films including The Art of Love with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, The Oscar, and the Bob Hope comedy Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!
Later work and life beyond acting
In 1968, Sommer achieved leading-actor status in The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, a comedy about an East German athlete who pole-vaults over the Berlin Wall. The 1970s brought cult horror films with director Mario Bava — Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil — and British sex comedies Percy and Percy's Progress. She also appeared in the 1974 Agatha Christie adaptation And Then There Were None and the 1975 Carry On film Carry On Behind.
After later roles in The Prisoner of Zenda and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, Sommer scaled back her screen work to focus on painting. In the mid-1980s, she won a $3.3 million defamation judgment against Zsa Zsa Gabor following a feud that began on the TV show Circus of the Stars. Sommer was married twice: to writer Joe Hyams from 1964 to 1981, and to hotelier Wolf Walther from 1993 until his death in 2026.
