Social Entertainment / People

Elke Sommer

Acting · Born November 5, 1940 · Berlin, Germany

Elke Sommer, born Elke von Schletz, is a German actress, entertainer and artist, who has starred in many Hollywood films. She was spotted by film director Vittorio De Sica while on holiday in Italy, and began appearing in films there in 1958. Also that year, she changed her surname from Schletz to Sommer, which was easier to pronounce for a non-German audience. She quickly became a noted sex symbol and moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s. She also became one of the most popular pin-up girls of the time, and posed for several pictorials in Playboy magazine, including the September 1964 and December 1967 issues. Sommer became one of the top film actresses of the 1960s. She made just shy of 100 film and television appearances between 1959 and 2005, including A Shot in the Dark with Peter Sellers, The Art of Love with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, The Oscar with Stephen Boyd, Boy Did I Get a Wrong Number! with Bob Hope, the Bulldog Drummond extravaganza Deadlier Than the Male, The Wrecking Crew with Dean Martin, and The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz. In 1964, she won a Golden Globe award as Most Promising Newcomer Actress for The Prize, a film in which she co-starred with Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson.

Movies with Elke Sommer

• A Shot in the Dark (1964) — Maria Gambrelli
• And Then There Were None (1974) — Vera Clyde
• Lisa and the Devil (1974) — Lisa Reiner
• The Wrecking Crew (1968) — Linka Karensky
• The Art of Love (1965) — Nikki Dunnay
• The Oscar (1966) — Kay Bergdahl
• The Prisoner of Zenda (1979) — Countess Montparnasse
• The Corrupt Ones (1967) — Lilly Mancini
• Baron Blood (1972) — Eva Arnold
• The Prize (1963) — Inger Lisa Andersson
• Auf Wiedersehen (1961) — Suzy Dalton
• Deadlier Than the Male (1967) — Irma Eckman

TV shows with Elke Sommer

• Gisbert (1999)