Elke Sommer, Actress in ‘A Shot in the Dark’ and ‘The Prize,’ Dies at 85

Elke Sommer, the striking German beauty who starred in such films as A Shot in the Dark, The Prize, The Art of Love and Deadlier Than the Male during her 1960s heyday in Hollywood, has died. She was 85. Sommer died Wednesday at her Bel-Air home of heart failure, her stepson Sebastian Walther told the German news organization Bild. “Elke passed away peacefully around 10 p.m. Now she can finally be with her beloved husband again,” he said. Caper/espionage films were a specialty for Sommer, who also was memorable with Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth in The Money Trap (1965), with Robert Stack in The Corrupt Ones (1967); with Gary Lockwood in They Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968); and with Dean Martin and Sharon Tate in the Matt Helm spy spoof The Wrecking Crew (1968). In 1966, she portrayed a fashion designer who has a romance with a self-absorbed actor (Stephen Boyd) in The Oscar and played a rebellious French movie queen who’s tired of making bubble-bath commercials in the Bob Hope comedy Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! After her movie career in the U.S. waned, Sommer starred for Italian horror maestro Mario Bava in Baron Blood (1972), in which her character confronts a sadistic 400-year-old nobleman (Joseph Cotten), and in Lisa and the Devil (1973), where she plays an American tourist lured by Satan (Telly Savalas) into a haunted house in Spain. The effervescent actress, who received a big break from Italian actor Vittorio De Sica early in her career, made films in Italy, France, Spain, England and her native country — she was fluent in five languages — before breaking out in Hollywood in MGM’s The Prize (1963). As the Swedish chaperone for a Nobel Prize in Literature recipient (Paul Newman), she helps thwart East German spies in the Ernest Lehman-scripted, Mark Robson-directed thriller. The performance landed her a Golden Globe for best female newcomer, shared with Tippi Hedren of The Birds and Ursula Andress of Dr. No. In 1964, Sommer posed for Playboy for the first time and spent some time disrobed as the maid Maria Gambrelli, who is accused of murder before being rescued (and romanced) by the bumbling Inspector Clousseau (Peter Sellers), in Blake Edwards’ A Shot in the Dark. “It has happened frequently that I am on a golf course for example, with the regular crowd on Tuesdays, and from a distance, I hear someone yelling, ‘Hey Maria Gambrelli! How are you!?'” she recalled in a 2014 interview for the website Film Talk. “It makes me feel very privileged — all of the Pink Panther films were very good, and I’m very happy that a lot of people say A Shot in the Dark is the best, which I think is very true.” Sommer also was a damsel in distress opposite James Garner and Dick Van Dyke in Norman Jewison‘s The Art of Love (1965), then played one of two gorgeous lesbian assassins working for criminals seeking to corner Saudi Arabian oil rights in the satire Deadlier Than the Male (1967). Her prospects in Hollywood were not helped when she played a defecting East German Olympic star who pole-vaults over the Berlin Wall in lingerie in the Cold War comedy The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968), also starring Bob Crane and Werner Klemperer of Hogan’s Heroes fame. An only child, Elke Schletz was born in Berlin on Nov. 5, 1940. Her father, Peter, was a Protestant minister who died when she was 14; her mother, Renata, was a homemaker. At 17, she moved alone to London for a year to work as an au pair before college. On vacation with her mom in the seaside town of Viareggio, Italy, someone pinned a ribbon on her while she was sitting in a café and declared her the winner of a beauty contest, and her photo in the newspaper the next day caught the attention of a producer. She got $2,000 to play a German tourist given a guided tour of Rome in L’amico del giaguaro (1959), then accepted an offer from De Sica to portray a chambermaid opposite him in Men and Noblemen (1959). After adopting Sommer as her surname and making several other films in Europe, including Love, the Italian Way (1960), Daniela by Night (1961) and Why Bother to Knock (1961) — her English-language debut — she signed a seven-picture deal with prolific German producer Atze Brauner. In Das Mädchen und der Staatsanwalt (1962), her character has a relationship with a prosecutor, a much older man, in order to get her mother out of prison. American producer Pandro S. Berman (Father of the Bride, Ivanhoe) spotted her in that. “Somehow he got my number in my house in Germany, and one day he called me,” she remembered. “My mother said, ‘Elke, there’s someone from Los Angeles on the phone.’ ‘Los Angeles?!’ So I said, ‘Hello?’ ‘Are you Elke Sommer?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Would you like to star in a picture opposite Paul Newman?’ I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to.'” In addition to The Prize, she was seen in another 1963 feature, the all-star war film The Victors. In the 1970s, Sommer appeared in such movies as Percy (1971), Zeppelin (1971), It’s Not the Size That Counts (1974), Wolfgang Petersen’s One or the Other (1974), Ten Little Indians (1975), Carry on Behind (1975) and Richard Quine’s remake of The Prisoner of Zenda (1979). She started out in regional theater in 1970 with the lead in Irma la Douce and toplined stage productions of Born Yesterday, Cactus Flower, Woman of the Year and Same Time, Next Year. On television, Sommer played the wife of Joseph Goebbels (Ian Holm) in the 1982 ABC miniseries Inside the Third Reich, was a frequent guest on Martin’s NBC variety show and showed up on St. Elsewhere, Fantasy Island and The Love Boat. She also was a cabaret singer who recorded several albums; an accomplished painter (she had her first art exhibition when she was 24 and hosted a how-to PBS show, Painting With Elke Sommer); a race-car aficionado (she hosted another program, the syndicated Elke Sommer’s World of Speed and Beauty): and an excellent tennis player. In December 1993, a Santa Monica jury awarded her $3.3 million in libel damages from Zsa Zsa Gabor and her husband, Frederick von Anhalt, for defaming her in interviews published in two German publications in 1990. Sommer was married to Hollywood columnist and author Joe Hyams — they first met when he interviewed her for a New York Herald Tribune article about The Prize, and he was 17 years her senior — from 1964 until their 1981 divorce. She then wed German hotelier Wolf Walther (onetime GM of the Essex House in New York and managing director of the Century Plaza Hotel) in August 1993. She had no children of her own. In her Film Talk interview, Sommer said she felt “totally inadequate” when she first arrived in Hollywood. “One day when I was doing The Prize, I was sitting next to Mr. Berman in the commissary where we were having lunch and I saw these beautiful women coming in,” she recalled. I said, ‘Pandro, why did you call me all the way in Germany when you have all these beautiful women here at the studio?’ “And he said, ‘You have to look at the screen: behind you there is an aura. I can’t explain it, but you got it and they haven’t, despite all their beauty, their physical charms and their features.’ That was a very nice thing to say.”