Every so often a timeline does the writing for you. Elke Sommer's husband, Wolf Walther, died of cancer in July 2026. Three months later, on October 28, Elke died too — of heart failure, at home in Bel Air, at 85. Her birthday was November 5. She was eight days short of 86.
If you know one thing Elke Sommer did, it's 1964's "A Shot in the Dark," the second Pink Panther film and the one that turned Inspector Clouseau into a franchise. Sommer played Maria Gambrelli, a maid in a wealthy household where bodies keep turning up and every piece of evidence points at her. Peter Sellers' Clouseau takes one look at her and decides she's innocent — then spends the rest of the movie bending the investigation around that conclusion while more corpses pile up. Blake Edwards directed; it's still, to a lot of people, the best film in the series.
The year before, she'd been the female lead opposite Paul Newman in "The Prize," a Cold War thriller set around the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm. It got her a Golden Globe for Best Newcomer in 1964 — the same year "A Shot in the Dark" came out.
Sommer was born Elke von Schletz in Berlin's Spandau district on November 5, 1940, the daughter of Baron Peter von Schletz, a Lutheran minister who died when she was 14. She was spotted by Italian director Vittorio De Sica while on holiday in Italy and began appearing in Italian films starting in 1958, well before American studios noticed her.
The 1960s were her decade — "The Oscar," "Deadlier Than the Male," "The Wrecking Crew" with Dean Martin — and she kept working into the '70s, including two Mario Bava horror films, "Baron Blood" and "Lisa and the Devil," that have their own cult following now. She was also a serious painter who exhibited her work for decades.
Her first marriage, to Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, lasted from 1964 to 1981. In August 1993 she married Wolf Walther, a German hotelier eight years her junior who was managing director of New York's Essex House — the two met while she was appearing in the stage production "Tamara" in New York. They were together more than three decades, until his death from cancer this past July.
Sommer's death was first reported by the German tabloid Bild, as the Sweden Herald noted, and picked up by outlets including The Celeb Post, which reported she died of heart failure at her home in Bel Air. She was 85. Her 86th birthday would have been November 5. Three months after Wolf. Eight days before her own birthday.