(5 November 1940 – 28 October 2026)
The German actress Elke Sommer, who has died from heart failure at the age of 85, was a popular attraction in films of the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time when glamorous European performers were taken on by the UK and Hollywood film industry to give a little extra piquancy to their movies. She was born Elke von Schletz in 1940 in Berlin, then a part of Nazi Germany, to Baron Peter von Schletz and his wife Renata. After the war, she studied at a university preparatory secondary school but was not particularly good at maths and science although she excelled in languages.
At the beginning of her career she was discovered by the director Vittorio De Sica while she was on holiday in Italy and she quickly became a fixture in Hollywood during the 1960s. She changed her name from Schletz to Sommer, becoming a favourite in fan magazines, as well as appearing in Playboy. Before Hollywood called, she had appeared in many Italian and German productions which may not have seen the light of day outside their own countries.
Her first film in English was Don’t Bother to Knock in 1961, a British comedy with Richard Todd, but not a very amusing one, that fell flat at the box-office. A much better deal was Carl Foreman’s The Victors (1963), a personal statement about the futility of war with an all-star cast including Albert Finney, George Peppard, George Hamilton, Peter Fonda, Melina Mercouri, Jeanne Moreau and Romy Schneider. After that came Mark Robson’s The Prize with Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson, a Hitchcock-style thriller and very good too, for it earned her a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer in the female category. A Shot in the Dark was the second of the Inspector Clouseau films and demonstrated how Sommer had a flair for comedy. Norman Jewison’s The Art of Love (1965) was also a comedy, co-starring James Garner, Dick Van Dyke and Angie Dickinson. After The Oscar (1966) with Stephen Boyd, Sommer then appeared with Bob Hope in Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! which also starred Phyllis Diller, although it was not very good, ending up as an entry in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.
Elke Sommer progressed to leading lady status for Deadlier Than the Male, a Bulldog Drummond story directed by Ralph Thomas in 1966. It was a spoof of 007, with Richard Johnson as Drummond, followed by the not dissimilar The Wrecking Crew (1968) with Dean Martin as the spy chaser Matt Helm. Another thriller was Zeppelin (1971), set during the First World War, with Michael York. In 1974 she made And Then There Were None, the third remake of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians from 1945. It starred Richard Attenborough, Oliver Reed, Herbert Lom, Stephane Audran and Charles Aznavour. Then came the perhaps inevitable casting of Sommer in Carry On Behind, playing a Russian professor and apparently she earned the top salary for any Carry On performer - £30,000. With Peter Sellers again she did The Prisoner of Zenda in 1979 and then virtually gave up acting to concentrate on her painting. She occasionally made more films, sometimes back in Germany, and did some voice work on animated features.
Elke Sommer married the Hollywood newspaper columnist Joe Hyams in 1964 and after their divorce in 1981 she married the German hotelier Wolf Walther who died in July of this year.
MICHAEL DARVELL
