Elke Sommer

Elke Sommer (born 5 November 1940), born Elke Baronesse von Schletz, is a German actress, entertainer, and artist, born in Berlin to a Lutheran minister and his wife, Renata (nee Topp). After World War II, 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 movie actresses of the 1960s and made 99 movie 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 (1969) with Dean Martin; Sommer was the leading lady in each of these films.

In 1964, she won the Golden Globe Awards as Most Promising Newcomer Actress for The Prize, a film in which she co-starred with Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson.

In 1972, she starred in two Italian horror movies directed by Mario Bava: Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil. The latter film was subsequently re-edited (with 1975 footage inserted) to make a different movie called House of Exorcism. Sommer went back to Italy to star in the additional scenes that were inserted into the movie by its producer, against the wishes of the director.[citation needed]

In 1975, Peter Rogers cast her in Carry On Behind as the Russian Professor Vrooshka. She became the Carry Ons' highest paid performer, at £30,000 (an honour shared with Phil Silvers for Follow That Camel).

Sommer also performed successfully as a singer, making several albums.

Since the 1990s, she has concentrated more on painting than on acting. As an actress, she worked in half a dozen countries learning the languages (she speaks seven languages) and storing up images which she has subsequently expressed on canvas. Her artwork shows a strong Marc Chagall influence. Sommer had a long-running feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor that began in 1984 when both appeared on Circus of the Stars and escalated into a multi-million dollar libel suit by 1993.

In 2001, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to her.

She now lives in Los Angeles, California.

She married Joe Hyams (June 6, 1923 – November 8, 2008) in 1964, who was 17 years older, in Las Vegas in front of a Justice of the Peace. Elke Sommer suffered her first miscarriage while working on the set of The Money Trap, in which she played alongside Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth.

The second miscarriage followed exactly one year later during the filming of Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number, where she starred with Bob Hope under the direction of George Marshall.

In 1973, Elke Sommer and Joe Hyams tried again to start a family. While working on the set of Die Reise nach Wien she suffered her third miscarriage, and her marriage was on the rocks.

Her mother, Renata von Schletz, accompanied her to movie sets as well as on theater tours even after Elke Sommer’s marriage to Joe Hyams had failed and a new man came into her life: Tom Bohla. Bohla moved in with Sommer, who had separated from her husband, but was still sharing the house with him and had no intention to file for divorce.

Then she met Wolf Walther, eight years her junior and the general manager of New York City's luxury hotel Essex House. They were married on August 29, 1993 in Franconia. In a 2014 interview, Sommer described how she and Walther met:

"I was in New York City starring in Tamara and had to stay there for four months. So, I had to find an apartment but they were excruciatingly expensive, tiny and loud. As I knew the managing director of the Essex House, I wanted to talk to him about renting a room but the hotel had a new managing director, a man by the name of Wolf Walther. So we met. For him, it was love at first sight. For me, it took a little longer, but not much longer. As you may know, Tamara is a play, in which the audience follows the actor of their choice, and as you may also know, my husband is 6'5" and hard to miss. I saw him every night in the audience, following me. Every night. And that was the beginning of the greatest love story of my life, still unfolding and getting better by the day."