Elke Sommer died in Los Angeles of heart failure, aged 85. The German-born actress was one of the most restlessly mobile performers of the 1960s and 70s — moving between national cinemas, registers, and genres with an ease that obscured how unusual that achievement was for a German actor in postwar Hollywood. Born Elke Schletz in Berlin in 1940, the daughter of a Protestant pastor, she was evacuated to Bavaria during the war. The path to cinema was accidental: she won a beauty contest in Italy in 1958, was spotted by Vittorio De Sica, and found herself cast in a string of Italian comedies before pivoting to serious West German drama with The Death Ship, opposite Horst Buchholz. By 1961 she had made her first English-language film, the British comedy Don't Bother to Knock, opposite Richard Todd. Her big-studio breakthrough came in 1963, when she appeared in Carl Foreman's war fable The Victors — billed alongside Melina Mercouri, Jeanne Moreau, and Romy Schneider as one of the 'six most exciting women in the world' — and then landed opposite Paul Newman in The Prize, the adaptation of Irving Wallace's novel, earning a joint Golden Globe for most promising newcomer. But it was A Shot in the Dark, the 1964 Pink Panther sequel, that gave her the role most people remember. As the maid suspected of a string of murders, she played straight woman to Peter Sellers' Clouseau with the kind of comic timing that looks easy and isn't. The film remains one of the best entries in the series, and her performance is load-bearing in ways the posters never suggested. A string of high-profile Hollywood productions followed — The Art of Love with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, The Oscar with Stephen Boyd — but Sommer's range was never fully tested by Hollywood, which kept reaching for the bombshell template. The early 70s were more interesting. Two Mario Bava horror films, Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil, gave her material with actual texture. The 1974 Christie adaptation And Then There Were None and the following year's Carry on Behind — the 27th in the series — showed a performer happy to work in genre without embarrassment. She was never precious about the work. After The Prisoner of Zenda and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, Sommer scaled back screen appearances and turned to painting — a second career she took seriously. In the mid-1980s she became embroiled in a defamation dispute with Zsa Zsa Gabor after the two appeared together on Circus of the Stars; Sommer was ultimately awarded $3.3 million in damages. She was married twice: to writer Joe Hyams from 1964 to 1981, and to hotelier Wolf Walther from 1993 until his death in 2026. What the obituaries will call a 'prolific career' was also something more specific: evidence of what a genuinely multilingual, genre-fluid performer could do when Hollywood mostly wanted her to stand still and look beautiful. She rarely got roles that matched her range. The Bava films come closest.
