She was 85.
Elke Sommer, the striking blonde bombshell of German descent who was a mainstay of 1960s Hollywood comedies and espionage movies including “The Prize” and “A Shot in the Dark,” has died.
She’d 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: “The Friend of the Jaguar. She told Film Talk in a 2014 interview that some of her favorite actors, like Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, were also considered sex symbols. 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. She also starred in two Mario Bava horrors. By the 1990s, she’d turned her focus to painting but she occasionally made appearances in films and television shows. She voiced Yzma in the German dub of “The Emperor’s New Groove. Though her looks often seemed to garner the most headlines, Sommer didn’t take the sex symbol designation too seriously, saying that it was essentially meaningless. She did, however, believe in the importance of movie star glamour. “They shouldn’t be the girl next door, like the boy next door. They should be something very much above and people should say ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ when they see them.”
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 “The Prize,” Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther film “A Shot in the Dark,” James Garner and Dick Van Dyke in “The Art of Love,” Bob Hope in “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” and Dean Martin and Sharon Tate in “The Wrecking Crew. Work slowed a bit in the 1970s, but she found jobs once again in Europe, appearing in the World War I film “Zeppelin” with Michael York as well as the Agatha Christie adaptation “And Then There Were None. Sommer might also be remembered for a bizarre feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor, which originated during their appearance together on the show “Circus of the Stars” in 1984, where Sommer is said to have made comments about Gabor’s body. Besides, she said, she was always just acting the part. In a television interview for the 1967 crime film “Deadlier than the Male,” she told the reporter that she is “very much for glamour on the screen. “I think movie stars, if I can use that word…should be something extraordinary and above normal, above average to the people who pay a lot of money to go see them,” Sommer said.
