Elke Sommer

Elke Sommer (born 5 November 1940), born Elke Baronesse von Schletz, is a German actress, entertainer and artist who starred in many Hollywood films.

Career

Sommer was born in Berlin to a Lutheran minister and his wife, Renata (nee Topp). After the Second World War, the family was evacuated to Erlangen, a small university town in Southern Germany, where she attended the prestigious Gymnasium (high school) in Erlangen. However her father's death when she was 14 precluded further formal education, and she moved to England to be an au pair, to perfect her English and earn a living.

She was spotted by film director Vittorio De Sica while on holiday in Italy, and started appearing in films there in the late 1950s. 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 (September 1964 and December 1967).

She became one of the top film actresses of the 1960s and made 99 film and television appearances between 1959 and 2005, including A Shot in the Dark (1964) with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, The Art of Love (1965) with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, The Oscar (1966) with Stephen Boyd, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966) with Bob Hope, the Bulldog Drummond extravaganza Deadlier Than the Male (1966) and The Wrecking Crew (1968) with Dean Martin; Sommer was the leading lady in each of these films.