Elke Sommer, the German actress and painter who became one of the most recognizable European stars to cross into Hollywood in the 1960s, died on October 28, 2026 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 85.
Sommer’s career was remarkable for how easily she moved across borders, languages and genres. Emerging from European cinema, she became a familiar name in Hollywood comedy, drama, horror, adventure and television. Her roles ranged from sophisticated comedy opposite Peter Sellers to thrillers and horror, and she appeared alongside stars such as Paul Newman and Bob Hope. Later she worked in television and voice acting, including voicing Yzma in the German dub of “The Emperor’s New Groove.”
More than six decades after her rise to international fame, films such as “A Shot in the Dark” and “The Prize” still evoke the elegance, humor and screen presence that made Sommer memorable. She represented the postwar crossover wave of European stars who enlivened the tail end of the Hollywood studio era. Her sex-kitten image gave her a decade in the limelight playing exotic continental paramours and glamorous assassins, but her acting was marked by sensitivity, poise, calm and an understated style. She brought to each scene what she called the energy it required.
Sommer was also an accomplished painter who took her artwork seriously. She began painting as a teenager and pursued it throughout her Hollywood career. Her first solo exhibition was held in Beverly Hills in 1965 at the McKenzie Galleries, and she eventually had 40 solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States. Her work was colorful, imaginative and often based on fantasy, showcasing beautiful women, whimsical figures and romantic scenes. She modeled herself on Marc Chagall, whose work deeply shaped her imaginative, colorful style. Sommer once said she would rather be remembered as a painter who acted than an actress who painted—a testament to how much her artwork meant to her.
She was born in Berlin, the only daughter of Peter von Schletz, a Lutheran pastor of aristocratic stock, and his wife, Renata. Despite her father’s background, the family grew up in poverty in a one-bedroom basement apartment after being evacuated during wartime to the village of Nierdendorf in 1942, when Elke was an infant. Hardship was aggravated by her father’s death in 1955. The fee she received for her first film, the 1959 Italian comedy “The Friend of the Jaguar,” was a godsend. In 1957 she had been working as an au pair in London while waiting to enroll at a language school; she intended to become an interpreter or a teacher of classical languages. But she won a local beauty contest while on holiday in Viareggio, Italy, which led to her being cast by director Giuseppe Bennati in “The Friend of the Jaguar” as a German tourist.
Sommer brought freshness and gameness to her most celebrated role: Maria Gambrelli, the maid whom Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau goes out of his way to exonerate of murder in the 1964 comedy “A Shot in the Dark.” She sparked off Sellers’s improvisational courage in scenes such as the interrogation in which Clouseau sets himself on fire by stowing an ignited cigarette lighter inside his raincoat. Often slotted into light comedies, Sommer—while only in her mid-20s—held her own against many heavyweights of the genre: Sellers, Dick Van Dyke in “The Art of Love,” Bob Hope in “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” and Dean Martin in “The Wrecking Crew.”
Adopting her stage name, she was cast in the high-society comedy “Men and Noblemen” for director Vittorio De Sica. MGM distributed the German child-prostitution drama “The Girl and the Prosecutor” in the US, leading to Sommer’s big Hollywood break: starring opposite Paul Newman in “The Prize” as the Swedish chaperone to his dissolute author. She won a Golden Globe as most promising newcomer. Her toned physique was displayed in the 1966 Bond rip-off “Deadlier Than the Male,” playing one of a pair of bikini-clad bickering hitwomen who dispatches victims with bullet-firing cigars. She kept fans happy with pin-up shots, including two Playboy pictorials, while working within the established framework of the time for female studio actors.
But the fixation on her looks and diminishing returns for arm-candy roles eventually stifled her Hollywood career. Sommer, who spoke seven languages, was disillusioned by the limited scope the industry offered her. She appeared alongside Sharon Tate in the 1969 film “The Wrecking Crew,” but after the Manson murders, Sommer’s husband, Hollywood journalist Joe Hyams, received repeated death threats from Manson Family members.
According to film historian Richard Harland Smith, the murders and threats may have influenced her decision to temporarily exit Hollywood filmmaking. She spent much of the following two decades working internationally, including in England and Italy, while dividing her time between Germany and Los Angeles. She settled back in Los Angeles permanently in the 1990s.
The tacky “The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz,” starring Sommer as a defecting Olympic pole-vaulter who hops the Berlin Wall, took the toll out of her Hollywood drive. In the 1970s and 1980s she returned almost exclusively to European features, including Mario Bava’s “Baron Blood” and “Lisa and the Devil,” and a role as a double-entendre-spouting Russian archaeologist in “Carry On Behind.” She later gravitated toward television, singing and theater; her 1970 stage debut was headlining the US tour of the musical version of “Irma la Douce.”
Though her looks often grabbed headlines, Sommer did not take the sex-symbol designation too seriously, saying it was essentially meaningless. “My whole life, I have been directed, I have been produced, I spoke the lines written for the character,” she said. “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 movie-star glamour.
“I think movie stars … should be something extraordinary and above normal, above average to the people who pay a lot of money to go see them,” she 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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*Freelance journalist
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