Elke Sommer, the German actress whose beauty and comic timing led to a co-starring role with Peter Sellers in the slapstick Pink Panther sequel “A Shot in the Dark” and in other Hollywood films of the 1960s opposite Paul Newman and Bob Hope, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 85.
The death was confirmed by Erwin Schneider, a friend of Ms. Sommer’s.
Ms. Sommer was only 23 but had already appeared in more than two dozen movies, most of them German or Italian, when she arrived in Hollywood to much fanfare. Critics tended to concentrate on her looks — the high cheekbones and platinum blond hair in her trademark bouffant — and what she called the “sex kitten” quality of her roles. She said that only after she began decades of regional and dinner theater stage work, starting in the late 1960s, did she begin to feel like a real actress.
Her first notable American film role was in “The Prize” (1963), playing a government escort for Mr. Newman’s character, a bad-boy Nobel laureate in literature. Ms. Sommer recalled being intimidated by working with Mr. Newman “until he took me Go-Karting, and that really broke the ice.”
She then featured in Blake Edwards’s “A Shot in the Dark” (1964), which provided an early signal of deeper talent. As a maid who may have killed a chauffeur, Ms. Sommer could do no wrong in the eyes of Inspector Clouseau (Mr. Sellers), the bumbling, smitten detective.
Writing in The New York Times, the movie critic Bosley Crowther called her a “bright comedy foil” in a film in which the two stars find themselves caught in a traffic jam after leaving a nudist camp.
Ms. Sommer found it hard to capitalize on that promising moment, instead appearing in such lackluster fare as “The Art of Love” (1965), a farce with Dick Van Dyke; “The Money Trap” (1965), a crime drama starring Glenn Ford; and “The Oscar” (1966), as the wife of an amoral Hollywood actor (Stephen Boyd).
She also appeared in Mr. Hope’s “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” (1966) as a runaway European film star who objects to taking bubble baths in all her movies. Critics saw it mostly as a tasteless vehicle for the comedy star to ogle Ms. Sommer.
In “Deadlier Than the Male” (1967), she was a heartless assassin who murdered an oil tycoon on his private plane and then made her getaway by parachute, barefoot and in short shorts. Reviewers took the film for what it was: fantasy sadism.
She starred as an East German Olympic champion in “The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz” (1968), a film that Renata Adler of The Times called an “unrelievedly awful” comedy that seemed to “view the Cold War as a vast conspiracy to get people undressed.” The title character defected by pole-vaulting over the Berlin Wall.
As an assassin engaged to an evil gold thief, she starred in “The Wrecking Crew” (1968) opposite Dean Martin in his last outing as the secret agent Matt Helm.
During her Hollywood years, she was a game guest star on the variety and comedy shows of stars like Mr. Hope, Mr. Martin, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, Andy Williams and Kermit the Frog.
Wearing a body-hugging gown and affecting a sultry, pouty-lipped persona, she had some fun with her image on “The Muppet Show” in 1979. Kermit had to explain that she had misunderstood when he told her the show tried to “appeal to adults.”
Elke Schletz was born on Nov. 5, 1940, in Berlin, and spent the war years near Erlangen in Bavaria. She was the only child of Peter von Schletz, a Lutheran minister who died when she was 14, and Renata (Topp) von Schletz.
At school, she excelled in athletics, particularly track, and was a standout in Latin and Greek studies. She learned English while working as an au pair in England for seven months when she was 17 and said she aspired to a career as an interpreter in the German diplomatic corps.
The next year, she was sidetracked into acting while on vacation in Viareggio, Italy, with her mother. She won a restaurant dance contest that automatically entered her in a local beauty pageant. A producer then saw her photo in a newspaper and helped smooth her path into Italian films. .
“They offered me 2,000 bucks and that was it,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “I mean, the money was so easy, I had to take it. My mother didn’t like it, of course, but we really did need the money. I was just cast as decoration, you know, I’d walk in and walk out. I honestly didn’t like it because it seemed so silly. I also didn’t have any idea what I was doing.”
She changed her surname to the marquee-friendly Sommer and, after appearing in a few Italian movies, including the comedy “Men and Noblemen” (1959) with Vittorio De Sica, her career advanced in Germany and beyond, often in sexpot roles.
After her decade of high visibility was over, she remained busy in lower-profile parts. She appeared in two Italian horror films directed by Mario Bava, “Baron Blood” (1972) and “Lisa and the Devil”. She was the guilt-ridden former governess in “Ten Little Indians” (1974), a multinational version of a film adaptation in which Agatha Christie’s collection of suspects are gathered at a hotel in Iran.
In “Carry on Behind” (1975), part of a bawdy British comedy franchise, Ms. Sommer was a visiting Russian archaeologist whose limited command of English led to almost nonstop double entendres and slapstick. She also played a countess in a 1979 comic remake of the adventure story “The Prisoner of Zenda,” reuniting with Mr. Sellers.
Ms. Sommer played Magda Goebbels in the all-star ABC television movie “Inside the Third Reich” (1982); starred with Christopher Plummer and Maggie Smith in the film “Lily in Love” (1984), based on a Ferenc Molnár play; and had a cameo in the 1986 NBC mini-series “Peter the Great.” Beginning in the 1980s, she mostly acted in German movies and television.
She made her stage debut in an American tour of the musical “Irma la Douce” in 1970 and worked in regional and community theater over the next four decades. A painter since her teens, she also had numerous shows of her art, which was in the naïve or primitivist style. “I paint peasants with big hands and feet,” she was quoted as saying, by way of good-natured explanation, in a collectors’ magazine. She also had a public television show, “Painting With Elke Sommer,” and published a book by the same name in 1984.
In 1993, a Santa Monica, Calif., jury awarded Ms. Sommer more than $3 million in a defamation lawsuit she brought against TV personality Zsa Zsa Gabor and her husband, Frédéric von Anhalt, for comments they made to German magazines about her living in squalor.
“I felt my dignity had been taken away, and now it’s been restored,” Ms. Sommer told The Los Angeles Times, which called the matter “the largest personal libel judgment in history.” Ms. Gabor then filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Ms. Sommer’s first husband was the columnist Joe Hyams. They married in 1964 and eventually separated but did not formally divorce until 1993. That year she married Wolf Walther, a hotel executive who was then managing director of the Essex House in New York; they met when she stayed at the hotel while appearing in “Tamara.” He died in July.
“When I think about it, I’m grateful” for the Hollywood years, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. In the same interview, she noted, “But I also know I could never play the game like others could.”
“There’s a frantic quality in this business that can get to you,” she said. “I’ve tried to avoid it as much as possible and still do the work.”
Claire Moses contributed reporting.
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