She set out to be an interpreter and wound up as Maria Gambrelli, the murder-suspect maid rescued and romanced by a bumbling Inspector Clouseau.
Elke Sommer, the German-born actress who became a fixture of 1960s Hollywood comedies and espionage pictures, died Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, at her home in Bel Air, Los Angeles. She was 85. Her stepson, Sebastian Walther, told the German newspaper Bild that she died of heart failure, a week before her 86th birthday.
“Elke passed away peacefully around 10 p.m. Now she can finally be with her beloved husband again [German hotelier Wolf Walther],” Walther said. She had been bedridden for a long period, according to German reports. Los Angeles police said officers were called to Sommer’s street that night for the death of an 85-year-old woman.
Strangers Still Shouted Maria Gambrelli
Blake Edwards cast her as the maid accused of murder in “A Shot in the Dark,” the 1964 Pink Panther sequel in which Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau clears her, then falls for her. The part never left her. She told Film Talk in a 2014 interview that regulars at her Tuesday golf game would still shout the character’s name at her from across the course.
In the 1960s she posed for Playboy, in photographs taken by her first husband, Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams. They married in November 1964 and divorced in 1981.
Her Hollywood opening had come from producer Pandro S. Berman, who spotted her in a German drama screened for the Golden Globes. He put her in MGM’s “The Prize” (1963) as the Swedish chaperone to Paul Newman’s Nobel Prize in Literature recipient, helping thwart East German spies in a thriller written by Ernest Lehman and directed by Mark Robson. It won her the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer, shared with Tippi Hedren of “The Birds” and Ursula Andress of “Dr. No.” Sommer never took the sex symbol label seriously, pointing out that two of her favorites, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, wore it too.
A Ribbon in a Viareggio Cafe
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 was evacuated from the capital to the south in 1942, and she grew up in Erlangen. Her father died when she was 14. At 17 she went alone to London for a year as an au pair, training in foreign languages, several of which she came to speak fluently.
The movies found her on a beach holiday. In 1958, vacationing in Viareggio, Italy, with her mother, she was crowned Miss Viareggio after someone pinned a ribbon on her in a cafe, and the newspaper photograph did the rest. Vittorio De Sica noticed and brought her to Rome, where she made her first film, “The Friend of the Jaguar.” Berlin producer Artur Brauner signed her in 1959, and she broke through in German-speaking Europe opposite Horst Buchholz in “Das Totenschiff.”
She Sued Zsa Zsa Gabor and Won
Capers and spy pictures became her territory: “The Money Trap” (1965) with Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth, “The Corrupt Ones” (1967) with Robert Stack, “They Came to Rob Las Vegas” (1968) with Gary Lockwood, and the Matt Helm spoof “The Wrecking Crew” (1968) with Dean Martin and Sharon Tate. In Norman Jewison’s “The Art of Love” (1965) she played the woman James Garner and Dick Van Dyke had to rescue, a French movie queen fed up with bubble-bath commercials in Bob Hope’s “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” (1966), and one of two lesbian assassins in “Deadlier Than the Male” (1967).
When the American roles thinned, Italian horror director Mario Bava took her on. She confronted a sadistic 400-year-old nobleman played by Joseph Cotten in “Baron Blood” (1972) and played an American tourist lured by Satan, played by Telly Savalas, into a haunted house in Spain in “Lisa and the Devil” (1973). She also appeared in “And Then There Were None” (1974) and the British comedy “Carry On Behind” (1975), and reunited with Sellers for “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1975).
Television kept her working on both sides of the Atlantic: “The Dean Martin Show,” “The Muppet Show” in 1978, “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “St. Elsewhere” and “Inside the Third Reich.”
In the 1980s she feuded with Zsa Zsa Gabor after the two worked together on “Circus of the Stars,” sued Gabor and her husband for defamation and won $3.3 million in damages. She made records, acted on stage and painted, exhibiting internationally under the name E. Schwartz, and took home two Bambi awards. Her last credit was the 2017 animated short “A Thousand Kisses,” voicing Nette.
The Village Where They Married
Wolf Walther, the German hotelier she had been with since 1989, died July 22 in Los Angeles at 77 after a long cancer illness. The couple married in August 1993 in Marloffstein, in Bavaria’s Erlangen-Höchstadt district; it was a second marriage for both, and they had no children together. For decades they shuttled between the Franconian village and Los Angeles, moving to the U.S. for good in 2025 so he could be treated there. His son Sebastian cared for Sommer to the end.
Her last wish was to be buried in the family grave in Marloffstein, beside her parents and her husband, in the village where the couple wed. The transfer of the urns from the United States could take months.
“Mein Herz ist gebrochen,” Sommer said after his death — my heart is broken.
