Elke Sommer, the actress of The Pink Panther has died at the age of 85

Born in Berlin on November 5, 1940, during the Nazi occupation, Elke Sommer (stage name of Elke Schletz), was the daughter of the housewife Renata Topp and the Protestant pastor Peter Schletz. During the Second World War she moved with her family to the small town of Niederndorf. After her father's death, which occurred when she was only 14, she moved to London in 1957, where she worked as an au pair for the family of actress Vicki Michelle.

At the end of the 1950s, during a holiday in Italy, while in Viareggio, Sommer was noticed by the director Vittorio De Sica, who invited her to Rome for an audition. Soon he had made his first appearances in several films. By the early 1960s she had moved to Hollywood and become a popular pin-up model. In 1964 she posed for Playboy magazine for the first time.

In the same decade she starred in famous films such as Stockholm North by Northwest (1963) with Paul Newman (for which she won the Golden Globe as Best New Actress, an award she shared with Tippi Hedrem for The Birds and Ursula Andress for Agent 007 – License to Kill), the second chapter of the Pink Panther saga entitled A Shot in the Dark (1964) with Peter Sellers, The Art of Loving (1965) with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, Fallen of an Idol (1966) with Stephen Boyd, A Bikini for Didi (1966) with Bob Hope, Deadlier Than a Male (1967), Mission Accomplished stop. Kisses Matt Helm (1968) with Dean Martin and Sharon Tate and Comrade Schultz's Forbidden Miniskirt (1968).

In the Seventies he starred in the films Zeppelin (1971) with Michael York, ...And Then There Were None (1974), the adaptation of the novel Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie, The Horrors of Nuremberg Castle (1972) and Lisa and the Devil (1973), both by Mario Bava, Carry On Behind (1975), The House of Exorcism (1975) by Mario Bava and with Sylva Koscina. His last appearance on the big screen was in 1984.

After having also experimented with singing, from the 1990s Sommer had gradually abandoned acting to dedicate himself to painting, which showed a strong influence of the works of Marc Chagall. On the private life front, in 1981 she divorced her first husband, while in 1993 she married the hotelier Wolf Walther, who was a few years younger than her and who was already the father of two children, Sebastian and Caroline.