The pastor’s daughter who set out to be an interpreter, until someone pinned a ribbon on her in an Italian cafe, has died at home.
Elke Sommer, the German-born actress who became a fixture of 1960s Hollywood comedies and espionage pictures, died at her home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026. She was 85, and her death came a week before her 86th birthday. Her stepson, Sebastian Walther, told the German newspaper Bild that she died of heart failure.
Officers responded that night to a death on Sommer’s street, that of a woman aged 85, according to Los Angeles police.
“Elke passed away peacefully around 10 p.m. Now she can finally be with her beloved husband again [German hotelier Wolf Walther],” Walther said.
Her best-known role was Maria Gambrelli, the maid accused of murder in “A Shot in the Dark,” the 1964 Pink Panther sequel in which Peter Sellers’ bumbling Inspector Clouseau clears her and then falls for her. Blake Edwards cast her. The part never left her: in a 2014 Film Talk interview, Sommer said the regulars at her Tuesday golf game still called the character’s name across the course.
A Ribbon Pinned in a Cafe
A Protestant pastor, Peter Schletz, and his wife, Renata, a homemaker, had one child: Elke Schletz, born in Berlin on Nov. 5, 1940. The family left the capital for the south in an evacuation in 1942, and Erlangen became her hometown. She lost her father at 14. A year as an au pair took her alone to London at 17, where she also received foreign-language training, and she went on to speak six languages. She wanted to be an interpreter.
A 1958 beach holiday in Viareggio, Italy, with her mother redirected all of that. Someone pinned a ribbon on her in a cafe, she was crowned Miss Viareggio, and the newspaper photograph did the rest. Vittorio De Sica noticed her and brought her to Rome, where she made her first film, “The Friend of the Jaguar.” A contract from the Berlin producer Artur Brauner followed in 1959, and her breakthrough across German-speaking Europe came opposite Horst Buchholz in “Das Totenschiff.”
Somehow He Got My Number
Hollywood arrived by telephone. The producer Pandro S. Berman saw her in “Das Mädchen und der Staatsanwalt” (1962), in which her character has a relationship with a much older prosecutor to get her mother out of prison, and tracked her down. “Somehow he got my number in my house in Germany, and one day he called me,” Sommer said in a 2014 interview.
Berman cast her in MGM’s “The Prize” (1963) as the Swedish chaperone to Paul Newman’s Nobel Prize in Literature recipient, a role that has her helping thwart East German spies. Ernest Lehman wrote the thriller and Mark Robson directed it. The part won her the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer, shared with Tippi Hedren of “The Birds” and Ursula Andress of “Dr. No.” Carl Foreman’s 1963 war film “The Victors” billed her as one of the “six most exciting women in the world.”
She never took the sex symbol label seriously, pointing out that two of her own favorites, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, wore it too. She posed for Playboy in the 1960s, in photographs taken by her first husband, the Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams. They married in November 1964 and divorced in 1981.
The decade kept her busy on both sides of the thriller-comedy line. She appeared with Glenn Ford and 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 spoof “The Wrecking Crew” (1968). In Norman Jewison’s “The Art of Love” (1965) she played the woman James Garner and Dick Van Dyke had to rescue; in “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” (1966), opposite Bob Hope, a French movie queen fed up with bubble-bath commercials; in “Deadlier Than the Male” (1967), one of two lesbian assassins.
When the American Roles Thinned
The Italian horror director Mario Bava took her on as the American parts dried up. She confronted a sadistic 400-year-old nobleman played by Joseph Cotten in “Baron Blood” (1972), and “Lisa and the Devil” (1973) gave her an American tourist whom Satan, played by Telly Savalas, lures into a haunted house in Spain. Then came “And Then There Were None” (1974), the British comedy “Carry On Behind” (1975) and “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1975), a reunion with Sellers.
After “Zenda” and Ralph Thomas’ heist film “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” she scaled back her screen appearances to concentrate on painting. Television kept her visible on both sides of the Atlantic: the “Dean Martin Show,” “The Muppet Show” in 1978, “Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “St. Elsewhere” and “Inside the Third Reich.”
Her 1980s feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor, which followed their work together on “Circus of the Stars,” ended in court. Sommer sued Gabor and her husband for defamation and won $3.3 million in damages.
She also made records, acted on stage and exhibited her paintings internationally under the name E. Schwartz. She took home two Bambi awards and made roughly 100 film and television appearances. Her last credit came in 2017, voicing Nette in the animated short “A Thousand Kisses.”
Her Last Wish, in Marloffstein
Wolf Walther, a German hotelier, had been her partner since 1989. They married in August 1993 in Marloffstein, in Bavaria’s Erlangen-Höchstadt district, a second marriage for both; they had no children together. For decades the couple shuttled between the Franconian village and Los Angeles, and in 2025 they moved to the U.S. for good so that he could be treated there. He died July 22 in Los Angeles at 77, after a long cancer illness.
“Mein Herz ist gebrochen,” Sommer said after his death — my heart is broken.
His son Sebastian cared for her to the end. The family grave in Marloffstein, where her parents and her husband lie, was her last wish, in the village where the couple wed. Transferring the urns from the United States could take months.
