Elke Sommer

1958. An eighteen-year-old girl is on vacation in Viareggio. She isn't looking for cameras or contracts, because her life plan is to become a diplomatic interpreter. But a jury crowns her Miss Viareggio, and director Vittorio De Sica decides that this German beauty with impossible cheekbones must be in his next film.

It was a matter of pure facial geometry.

Elke Schletz changed her last name to Sommer and gave up language classes to work in Italy. By 1959, she was already working on four different productions. Her rise was no mystery: it was a logistical operation built on beauty and work ethic, in a Europe looking for successors to the great divas of the day.

The Heist of the California Dollars

In 1963, she made her definitive breakthrough with The Prize. Sharing the screen with Paul Newman put her on the radar of major American studios. Hollywood saw in her the perfect alternative to Brigitte Bardot, but with a huge competitive edge: Sommer spoke flawless English and five other languages.

That intelligence defined her career in the sixties. In 1964, she shot A Shot in the Dark alongside Peter Sellers and became the most recognizable face of sophisticated comedy of the era. But she never let the city lights fool her. She maintained tight control over her image and avoided the one-sided contracts that tied other actresses to the whims of producers.

It wasn't all red carpets.

By the late sixties, her presence in film began to fade due to risky commercial decisions. She appeared in The Corrupt Ones in 1967 and in The Wrecking Crew in 1968. Critics began treating her as a decorative object, and she responded by retreating into a side of herself that few people outside her inner circle knew.

Paintbrushes and Million-Dollar Lawsuits

Under the pseudonym E. Sommer, the actress began exhibiting her oil paintings. What started as a refuge became a steady source of income that let her choose her roles with unusual freedom in the industry. Her paintings sold for thousands of dollars in galleries around the world, while cinema relegated her to supporting roles or European horror productions.

In 1972, she shot Baron Blood under Mario Bava's direction. It was a strange phase: her magnetism was still intact, but the scripts no longer matched her abilities. Sommer was always too smart for the naive blonde roles offered to her by the major studios.

Television was her next safe haven.

During the 1980s and 1990s, she focused on television series and films in Germany and the United States. Her personal life also made headlines due to a long-running legal battle with Zsa Zsa Gabor that lasted years and ended with a multimillion-dollar settlement in the German actress's favor. That trial made it clear that Sommer was not a woman to be trifled with in court.

In 2024, she appeared in the film Hundswut, directed by Daniel Alvarenga. The movie had a budget of approximately 1.2 million euros and was mostly shot on location in Bavaria.