Elke Sommer, A Shot in the Dark and Carry On Behind star, dies aged 85

Elke Sommer, the German actor in A Shot in the Dark, And Then There Were None and Carry On Behind, died aged 85 in Los Angeles after heart failure, Bild magazine reported. The account gave no date of death or family statement and supplied no detail beyond the stated cause.

Her death closes a career that moved unusually across languages and markets. Sommer belonged to the wave of European performers who reached Hollywood and English-language cinema with considerable success after post-war European New Wave cinema took hold.

The account calls her one of the few German actors to make waves in that period, while noting that Hollywood made much of her public image around her bombshell persona.

From Berlin to Hollywood

Born Elke Schletz in Berlin in 1940, Sommer was the daughter of a Protestant pastor. Her family evacuated her to Bavaria during the war.

She intended to work as an interpreter, but a trip to Italy in 1958 changed course. After she won a beauty contest, celebrated Italian director Vittorio de Sica spotted her and offered roles in a string of Italian comedy films.

The transition from comedy to weightier work came with the West German drama The Death Ship, opposite Horst Buchholz. Buchholz later appeared in the cowboy classic The Magnificent Seven.

Her first English-language film was the 1961 British comedy Don’t Bother to Knock, opposite Richard Todd. The source credits her gift for languages with the move. That year, she also appeared in Carl Foreman’s 1963 war fable The Victors, alongside Melina Mercouri, Jeanne Moreau and Romy Schneider.

The Victors billing called Sommer one of the “six most exciting women in the world.” That was promotional language, not an independent assessment. It also shows how quickly the industry attached a marketable identity to Sommer.

Her Hollywood breakthrough came in the same year, 1963, with The Prize, an adaptation of Irving Wallace’s hit novel. She played Paul Newman’s lover and jointly won the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.

A career in genres

A Shot in the Dark then accelerated her Hollywood career. In the sequel to The Pink Panther, Sommer played a maid suspected of a series of murders, a role that leaned heavily on her “sexpot” image.

After its success, her credits included:

• The Art of Love, with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke.
• The Oscar, with Stephen Boyd.
• Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!, a Bob Hope comedy.

In 1968, she attained leading-actor status with The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, a comedy about an East German athlete who pole-vaults over the Berlin Wall.

Her 1970s filmography included:

• Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil, two cult horror films by Mario Bava.
• Percy and Percy’s Progress, sex comedies for British director Ralph Thomas.

Sommer followed these with two prominent British films. She played secretary Vera Clyde in the 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s hit novel And Then There Were None. A year later, she appeared in the British sex comedy Carry On Behind, the 27th film in the Carry On series.

After another Peter Sellers film, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Ralph Thomas’s heist film A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, Sommer reduced her screen work and concentrated on painting. The account names no paintings, exhibitions or galleries. It establishes a change in priority, not the outline of a second artistic career.

Sommer married writer Joe Hyams from 1964 until 1981 and hotelier Wolf Walther from 1993 until his death in 2026.

In the mid-1980s, she also became embroiled in a long-running feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor after they appeared together on the TV show Circus of the Stars. Sommer was ultimately awarded $3.3m in damages for defamation.

What does her death change for her legacy?

Her death does not change the films. It changes the timing of any reassessment of her career. For viewers and programmers, the practical shift is that a life easily reduced to a Hollywood bombshell image can now be presented as a multilingual, cross-market career.

That career ran from Italian comedy through West German drama, Hollywood genre films, British horror and British sex comedy. Don’t Bother to Knock, The Victors, The Prize, A Shot in the Dark, And Then There Were None, Carry On Behind and The Prisoner of Zenda provide the evidence. The account’s framing, however, puts the “sexpot” label near the front. The wider record does not reduce to it.

Any claim about Sommer as a painter remains provisional because the source identifies no work, exhibition or institutional connection. The more demanding test of her legacy is whether audiences can move beyond the familiar billing to recognize the scope of work behind it.