Sommer died on Wednesday at his Bel Air home in Los Angeles, his stepson Sebastian Walther told German outlet Bild. The Los Angeles Police Department told The Associated Press that it responded to the death of an 85-year-old woman in the block of Somers on Wednesday night.

With expressive hazel eyes and blonde hair, often styled high in a beehive, Sommer worked with some of the biggest stars of the time, including Paul Newman in “The Prize”, Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther film “A Shot in the Dark”, James Garner in “The Art of Love” and Dick Van Dyke in “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” included Bob Hope. and Dean Martin and Sharon Tate in “The Wrecking Crew”.

Sommer was born Elke Schletz in Berlin on November 5, 1940, during World War II, although the family had to flee to the south in 1942. Her father, who died when she was 14, was a Protestant clergyman.

He intended to study languages, but during a trip to Italy in 1958 with his mother, Renata, he was noticed by someone in the Italian film industry, who invited him to star in his first film: “The Friend of the Jaguar”. Actor and film producer Vittorio De Sica also took notice of her and soon she was working steadily throughout Europe, Italy, Spain and England under the newly adopted surname Sommer.

He got the big Hollywood break from producer Pedro S. Berman, who had seen her in a German play performed for the Golden Globes, and offered her a role in “The Prize”, where she played the guardian and girlfriend of Newman’s Nobel Prize-winning character. In a review for the trade publication Variety, he wrote that Sommer, “doesn’t have a very spectacular role, but it looks like he’ll make it a secondary issue.” And it will win him the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer.

In Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther sequel “A Shot in the Dark”, she played Maria Gambrelli, a maid accused of murder who also sparks the romantic interest of Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau. She also posed in photographs shot by her first husband, Joe Hyams, for Playboy magazine at the time. They married in November 1964 and divorced in 1981.

In 1993 she married German hotelier Wolf Walther, who died in July aged 77.

Work slowed a bit in the 1970s, but she once again found work in Europe, appearing in the World War I film “Zeppelin” opposite Michael York as well as the Agatha Christie adaptation “And Then There Were None”. He also starred in two Mario Bava horror films. By the 1990s, she had turned her attention to painting, but she occasionally appeared in films and television shows. She voiced Yzma in the German dub of “The Emperor’s New Groove”.

Sommer can also be remembered for a bizarre feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor, which arose during their together appearance on the show “Circus of the Stars” in 1984, where Sommer is said to have made comments about Gabor’s body.

In 1990, a war of words broke out in the German media when Gabor was quoted as saying that Sommer was bankrupt, hanging out in dirty bars and earning a living by selling hand-knit sweaters for $150. Gabor’s husband Friedrich Prinz von Anhalt was also quoted in another publication as saying that Sommer was lying about her age, that she was almost bald and looked 100 years old.

Sommer filed a defamation and defamation suit demanding $10 million. In 1993, a jury ordered Gabor and her husband to pay Sommer $3.3 million.

Although her looks often grab the headlines, Sommer does not take the sex symbol designation very seriously, saying it is essentially meaningless. She told Film Talk in a 2014 interview that some of her favorite actors, such as Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, were also considered sex symbols. Besides, she said, she was always just playing the role.

“My whole life, I’ve been directed, I’ve been produced, I’ve spoken lines written for the character,” he said in the interview. “I was always playing, and the only thing I could bring was my energy. So what is it, this sex appeal? Why was I voted into this list of sexiest women? It’s not because of my looks or anything; it’s because of the energy.”

However, she believed in the importance of movie star glamour. In a television interview for the 1967 crime film “Deadlier than the Mail”, she told a reporter that she was “very fond of glamor on the screen.”

Sommer said, “I think movie stars, if I can use that word…must be something extraordinary and above the ordinary, above average to the people who pay a lot of money to see them.” “They shouldn’t be the girl next door, like the guy next door. They should be very over the top and make people go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ when they look at them.”

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