Obituary for Elke Sommer: The breathtaking blonde

“But who is the stunning blonde?” asks the voice off camera. “It can’t be anyone other than the seductive new star Elke Sommer.” Elke sounds more like “Elka” in American pronunciation.

The trailer doesn’t promise too much. “The Prize” was the first film that Elke Sommer shot in Hollywood. It marked her international breakthrough in 1963. Her macho description as a beguiling blonde fits her image of a “sex bomb,” which she would not escape for a long time.

In “The Prize,” she quickly ends up in bed with Newman. He plays an alcoholic and womanizer who comes to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her name is Lisa Andersson and she is tasked with stopping him from falling on behalf of the Swedish Foreign Ministry. The flirtation turns into a spy thriller when Soviet agents kidnap the Nobel Prize winner in physics played by Edward G. Robinson. In the middle of the firing line: the writer and his companion.

After the Miss Miracle

Actually, the time of the Fräuleinwunder in Hollywood was already over when Elke Sommer became famous there. The term is associated with the immediate post-war period, with GIs who went out with German girls in ruined cities and gave them nylon stockings. German-speaking actresses such as Hildegard Knef, Cornell Borchers and Maria Schell caused a greater or lesser sensation in American films.

Elke Sommer’s trademark was her blonde hair, which was sometimes piled up into an unbelievable bun the size of a cake. The actress was also predestined for silly roles. One of her best films is Blake Edward’s crime comedy “A Shot in the Dark” from the Pink Panther series.

There she is paired with Peter Sellers, the goofy trenchcoat Inspector Clouseau. Their investigation leads to a nudist camp. Immediately afterwards – also in 1964 – she shot the Karl May western “Unter Vultures” in Croatia, with Pierre Brice, but without Lex Barker.

Pastor’s daughter from Erlangen

Elke Sommer was born in Berlin in 1940, the only child of the Protestant pastor Peter Schletz and his wife Renate Topp. She grew up in Erlangen on the edge of Franconian Switzerland, where the family was evacuated.

Later, the journalists Oswalt Kolle and Siegfried Sommer derogatorily referred to her as the “Erlanger pastor’s daughter” because of her educated middle-class background. They apparently considered it impossible for attractive women to also read books.

As an au pair in London, Sommer completed foreign language training. She spoke six languages ​​and originally wanted to become an interpreter. At the age of 18, she was elected “Miss Viareggio” while on vacation in Italy. The director Vittorio De Sica brought her to the Cinecittà in Rome, where she appeared in front of the camera for three films. One has the beautiful title “Ragazzi del juke box”.

She changed her last name from Schletz to Sommer. Soon after, she got it a three-year contract from Berlin film producer Arthur Brauner. She made her German cinema debut in one of the strongest films of those years, Georg Tressler’s adaptation of B. Traven’s novel “The Ship of the Dead”, a film noir in ports and on the high seas with Horst Buchholz. A rapid rise.

Tête-à-tête against a nighttime backdrop. Elke Sommer sits with a television reporter from Bayerischer Rundfunk in her house near Erlangen in 1963. A candle flickers on the table, they drink cognac, the view goes into the dark garden. She should tell the journalist about her luck and how she made it to Hollywood.

It started, says the actress, with her film “The Girl and the Prosecutor,” whose foreign rights were bought by a US producer. This brought her to the attention of the film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which was looking for a leading actress for its Nobel Prize drama “The Prize”.

Summer is charming but also combative. She rejects accusations from the tabloid press: “I have never made a scandal in my life and have never done anything to get publicity.” Some Germans don’t begrudge her success abroad; she is trying to regain control of her image. And the reporter is happy that it is “so comfortable” with her.

Elke Sommer has made around a hundred cinema and television films, two dozen of which were Hollywood productions. She commuted between America and Germany. She made a remarkable comeback in German cinema in 1974 in Wolfgang Petersen’s psychological thriller “One of Us Both”. A duel against a West Berlin backdrop, she plays Miezi, the girlfriend of a college dropout who blackmails a professor for plagiarism.

Courageous beat hit

The actress also sang; the composer Gert Wilden tried to build her up as the pop chanson successor to Hildegard Knef in the 1960s. That failed, but at least she leaves behind songs like “Hey, hey, hey, I’m looking for a boy.” A courageous beat in which she barms: “Yes, if I knew someone who kissed me / Who went dancing with me and also understood my heart.”

Elke Sommer was married twice, from 1964 to 1981 to the American writer Joe Hyams and from 1993 to the hotelier Wolf Walther until his death in July of this year. Now she has died herself, in her home in Los Angeles. The cause of death is heart failure. She was 85 years old.