A ribbon pinned on a teenager in an Italian seaside cafe launched a career spanning Hollywood comedies and Italian horror, and it has now come to a close.
Elke Sommer died of heart failure at her home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, a week before her 86th birthday, her stepson, Sebastian Walther, told the German newspaper Bild. The German-born actress had been a fixture of 1960s Hollywood comedies and espionage pictures.
Officers responded that night to the death of an 85-year-old woman on Sommer’s street, Los Angeles police said. German reports said she had been bedridden for a long period.
“Elke passed away peacefully around 10 p.m. Now she can finally be with her beloved husband again [German hotelier Wolf Walther],” her stepson said.
The Maid Clouseau Could Not Forget
Director Blake Edwards cast Sommer as Maria Gambrelli, a maid accused of murder, in the 1964 Pink Panther sequel “A Shot in the Dark.” Inspector Clouseau, played by Peter Sellers, clears her and then falls for her.
The part never left her. In a 2014 interview with Film Talk, she said people on the golf course still called out the character’s name to her.
Sommer also 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.
From Golden Globe Newcomer to Horror
Producer Pandro S. Berman gave Sommer her Hollywood break after spotting her in a German drama screened for the Golden Globes. MGM put her in “The Prize” (1963) as a Swedish chaperone to Paul Newman’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, helping thwart East German spies in a script by Ernest Lehman that Mark Robson directed.
The role brought her the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer, shared with Tippi Hedren of “The Birds” and Ursula Andress of “Dr. No.” The sex symbol label that followed never impressed her; her point was that two of her own favorites, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, had worn it too.
She worked steadily through the decade. Sommer 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).
Comedy kept finding her. Norman Jewison’s “The Art of Love” (1965) cast her as a woman rescued by James Garner and Dick Van Dyke; in “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” (1966), with Bob Hope, she played a French movie queen fed up with bubble-bath commercials. In “Deadlier Than the Male” (1967) she was one of two lesbian assassins.
When American roles thinned, the Italian horror director Mario Bava took her on. She starred in “Baron Blood” (1972), opposite Joseph Cotten as a sadistic 400-year-old nobleman, and in “Lisa and the Devil” (1973) as an American tourist lured by Satan, played by Telly Savalas, into a haunted house in Spain. Later came “And Then There Were None” (1974), the British comedy “Carry On Behind” (1975) and “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1979), a reunion with Sellers.
Television carried her on both sides of the Atlantic, from “The Dean Martin Show” and “The Muppet Show” to “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “St. Elsewhere” and “Inside the Third Reich.”
Her feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor, which began in the 1980s after “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 painted, exhibiting internationally under the name E. Schwartz. Her last credit was the 2017 animated short “A Thousand Kisses,” in which she voiced Nette.
A Ribbon Pinned On in Viareggio
She was born Elke Schletz in Berlin on Nov. 5, 1940, the only child of Peter Schletz, a Protestant pastor, and his wife, Renata, a homemaker. The family left the capital for the south in an evacuation in 1942, and she grew up in Erlangen. Her father died when she was 14.
A year of work as an au pair took her alone to London at 17. She trained in foreign languages and spoke several fluently, and she had meant to become an interpreter.
A beach holiday in Viareggio, Italy, with her mother in 1958 ended that plan. Someone pinned a ribbon on her in a cafe, a newspaper photograph did the rest, and she was crowned Miss Viareggio. 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.”
The Urns Still Bound for Bavaria
Wolf Walther, a German hotelier, had been with Sommer since 1989. He died of cancer on July 22 in Los Angeles, at 77, after a long illness. They had wed in August 1993 in Marloffstein, in Bavaria’s Erlangen-Höchstadt district, a second marriage for both; they had no children together.
For decades they shuttled between the Franconian village and Los Angeles, and in 2025 they moved to the U.S. for good so he could be treated there. His son, Sebastian, cared for Sommer to the end.
Sommer said after his death: “Mein Herz ist gebrochen” — my heart is broken.
Her parents are buried in the family grave in Marloffstein, the village where the couple wed, and she asked to be laid to rest there with her husband. Months could pass before the urns are transferred from the United States.