Elke Sommer, Golden Globe winner for The Prize, dies at 85
The German-born star of The Prize and A Shot in the Dark died on October 28 at her Bel-Air home. Burial is planned in her family’s grave in Bavaria.
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The German-born star of The Prize and A Shot in the Dark died on October 28 at her Bel-Air home. Burial is planned in her family’s grave in Bavaria.
Elke Sommer, the German-born actress who won a Golden Globe for The Prize and played the maid Maria Gambrelli in A Shot in the Dark, died on October 28 at 85. Bild said she died of heart failure at her Bel-Air home, citing her close circle.
The Hollywood Reporter said her stepson, Sebastian Walther, confirmed the death to Bild. Bild’s account described an indirect chain: Walther informed Sommer’s best friend, who called photographer Erwin Schneider. Bild attributed the statement that Sommer died peacefully at about 10 p.m. to Schneider.
Sommer began making films in Italy in 1959, playing a German tourist in L’amico del giaguaro and a chambermaid opposite Vittorio De Sica in Men and Noblemen. She worked across European cinema before her Hollywood breakthrough in The Prize in 1963.
In that thriller, Sommer played the Swedish chaperone to a Nobel literature laureate portrayed by Paul Newman, helping thwart East German spies. The performance earned her the 1964 Golden Globe for best female newcomer, an honor she shared with Tippi Hedren for The Birds and Ursula Andress for Dr. No.
In Blake Edwards’s A Shot in the Dark (1964), her character Maria Gambrelli was a maid accused of murder, opposite Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. Sommer recalled in a 2014 Film Talk interview that people still greeted her by the character’s name decades later, recognition she said made her feel privileged.
As her Hollywood film career waned, Sommer returned to Italian cinema for Mario Bava’s horror films Baron Blood (1972) and Lisa and the Devil (1973). In the latter, she played a tourist drawn into a haunted house.
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The Hollywood Reporter’s retrospective described crime-caper and espionage films as Sommer’s specialty. NOS offered a more restrained assessment, saying her early successes did not bring lasting fame and judging her roles from the 1970s onward less memorable.
Bild said Sommer’s stepson is to arrange her burial in the family grave in Marloffstein, Bavaria, in accordance with her wishes. Transferring the urns could take months.
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