Elke Sommer Dies at 85 After a Multilingual Career — SkimNews
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- Elke Sommer died aged 85 in Los Angeles of heart failure, according to Bild magazine.
- Vittorio de Sica spotted Sommer after she won a beauty contest on a 1958 Italy trip and offered her Italian comedy roles; her languages later took her to Don’t Bother to Knock in 1961 and the 1963 war fable The Victors, where she was billed among the “six most exciting women in the world.”
- The Prize gave Sommer her Hollywood breakthrough in 1963 as Paul Newman’s lover and brought her a joint Golden Globe win for most promising newcomer.
- A Shot in the Dark cast Sommer as a maid suspected of a series of murders and leaned heavily on her “sexpot” image; after its success, she appeared in The Art of Love, The Oscar and Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!
- And Then There Were None featured Sommer as secretary Vera Clyde in the 1974 Agatha Christie adaptation; a year later she starred in Carry On Behind, the 27th film in the Carry On series.
- Mario Bava directed Sommer in two 1970s cult horror films, Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil; following The Prisoner of Zenda and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, she scaled back her screen appearances and concentrated on painting.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor and Sommer became embroiled in a long-running feud after appearing together on Circus of the Stars in the mid-1980s; Sommer was ultimately awarded $3.3m in damages for defamation.
Why it matters: The $3.3m defamation award against Zsa Zsa Gabor gives Sommer’s story a hard-edged legal coda, not just a nostalgia-driven film legacy. Her death at 85 closes a multilingual career that moved from Italian films to Hollywood, British comedy, Christie and Bava horror.
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