By Lindsey BahrAP Film Writer\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Oct. 29, 2026 3:23 PM PT <\/p>\n
Elke Sommer, the striking blond bombshell of German descent who was a mainstay of 1960s Hollywood comedies and espionage movies including \u201cThe Prize\u201d and \u201cA Shot in the Dark,\u201d has died. She was 85.<\/p>\n
Sommer died at home in Bel-Air 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\u2019s block Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cThe Prize,\u201d Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther film \u201cA Shot in the Dark,\u201d James Garner and Dick Van Dyke in \u201cThe Art of Love,\u201d Bob Hope in \u201cBoy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!\u201d and Dean Martin and Sharon Tate in \u201cThe Wrecking Crew.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d 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: \u201cThe Friend of the Jaguar.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Work in Hollywood in the 1960s<\/p>\n
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 \u201cThe Prize\u201d where she played chaperone and love interest to Newman\u2019s Nobel Prize-winning character. In the trade publication Variety\u2019s review, they wrote that Sommer \u201chasn\u2019t a very scintillating role, but has the looks to make that a secondary issue.\u201d And it would win her the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.<\/p>\n
In Blake Edwards\u2019 Pink Panther sequel \u201cA Shot in the Dark,\u201d she played Maria Gambrelli, a maid framed for murder, who also sparks the romantic interest of Sellers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
In 1993 she married German hotelier Wolf Walther, who died in July at age 77.<\/p>\n
Work slowed a bit in the 1970s, but she found jobs once again in Europe, appearing in the World War I film \u201cZeppelin\u201d with Michael York as well as the Agatha Christie adaptation \u201cAnd Then There Were None.\u201d She also starred in two Mario Bava horrors. By the 1990s, she\u2019d turned her focus to painting but she occasionally made appearances in films and television shows. She voiced Yzma in the German dub of \u201cThe Emperor\u2019s New Groove.\u201d<\/p>\n
Feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor<\/p>\n