Decades after Inspector Clouseau cleared the murder-suspect maid she played, strangers were still shouting the character’s name at her across a golf course.
Elke Sommer died Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, at her home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, where the German-born actress had lived in retirement. She was 85, and her face had been a fixture of Hollywood comedies and espionage pictures throughout the 1960s.
She died of heart failure a week before her 86th birthday, according to her stepson Sebastian Walther, who spoke to German media.
“Elke passed away peacefully around 10 p.m. Now she can finally be with her beloved husband again [German hotelier Wolf Walther],” Walther said.
German reports said she had been bedridden for a long period. Officers responded that night to a call on Sommer’s street reporting the death of an 85-year-old woman, according to Los Angeles police.
The Maid Clouseau Fell For
Blake Edwards cast her as Maria Gambrelli, the murder-suspect maid of “A Shot in the Dark,” the 1964 Pink Panther sequel. Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau bumbles his way to clearing her, then falls for her.
The role outlived most of her others, by her own account. She said in a 2014 interview that regulars at her Tuesday golf game still shouted the character’s name across the course.
Producer Pandro S. Berman had opened the door to Hollywood a year earlier, after spotting her in a German drama screened for the Golden Globes. He put her in MGM’s “The Prize” (1963), as the Swedish chaperone to Paul Newman’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a thriller in which she helps thwart East German spies. Ernest Lehman wrote it and Mark Robson directed.
She won the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer, shared with Tippi Hedren of “The Birds” and Ursula Andress of “Dr. No.”
The sex symbol label that followed never impressed her. Two of her own favorites, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, carried the same one, she noted. She posed for Playboy in the 1960s, photographed by her first husband, the Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams. They married in November 1964 and divorced in 1981.
A Ribbon Pinned in a Cafe
Peter Schletz, a Protestant pastor, and his wife, Renata, a homemaker, had one child: Elke Schletz, born in Berlin on Nov. 5, 1940. The family left the capital for the south in 1942 under evacuation, and she spent her childhood in Erlangen. She lost her father at 14.
A year as an au pair in London took her abroad by herself at 17, with training in foreign languages. She became fluent in several and wanted to be an interpreter.
A beach holiday in Viareggio, Italy, with her mother in 1958 ended that plan. Someone pinned a ribbon on her in a cafe, a newspaper photograph did the rest, and she was crowned Miss Viareggio. Vittorio De Sica brought her to Rome, where she made her first film, “The Friend of the Jaguar.” The Berlin producer Artur Brauner signed her in 1959, and “Das Totenschiff,” opposite Horst Buchholz, made her a star across German-speaking Europe.
From Matt Helm to Mario Bava
Capers and spy pictures became her territory. She made “The Money Trap” (1965) with Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth, “The Corrupt Ones” (1967) with Robert Stack, “They Came to Rob Las Vegas” (1968) with Gary Lockwood and “The Wrecking Crew” (1968), a Matt Helm spoof, with Dean Martin and Sharon Tate.
Comedy kept pace. Norman Jewison’s “The Art of Love” (1965) had James Garner and Dick Van Dyke rescuing her; in Bob Hope’s “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” (1966) she played a French movie queen fed up with bubble-bath commercials. In “Deadlier Than the Male” (1967) she was one of two lesbian assassins.
As American roles thinned, the Italian horror director Mario Bava took her on. She starred in “Baron Blood” (1972), opposite Joseph Cotten as a sadistic 400-year-old nobleman, and in “Lisa and the Devil” (1973), as an American tourist lured by Satan, played by Telly Savalas, into a haunted house in Spain. Then came “And Then There Were None” (1974), the British comedy “Carry On Behind” (1975) and “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1975), which reunited her with Sellers.
Television kept her working on both sides of the Atlantic: the “Dean Martin Show,” “The Muppet Show” in 1978, “Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “St. Elsewhere” and “Inside the Third Reich.” One booking cost her years. She and Zsa Zsa Gabor worked together on “Circus of the Stars,” and the feud that followed ran through the 1980s. Sommer sued Gabor and her husband for defamation and won $3.3 million in damages.
She also made records, acted on stage and painted, exhibiting internationally under the name E. Schwartz. She took home two Bambi awards. Her last credit came in 2017, voicing Nette in the animated short “A Thousand Kisses.”
A Grave Waiting in Marloffstein
Wolf Walther, a German hotelier, had been her partner since 1989. They married in August 1993 in Marloffstein, in Bavaria’s Erlangen-Höchstadt district, a second marriage for both. They had no children together.
For decades they shuttled between the Franconian village and Los Angeles. In 2025 she moved to the U.S. for good so he could be treated there. He died July 22 in Los Angeles at 77, after a long cancer illness.
After Walther’s death, Sommer said: “Mein Herz ist gebrochen” — my heart is broken.
His son Sebastian cared for her to the end. Her last wish was burial in the family grave in Marloffstein, the village where the couple wed, beside her parents and her husband. The transfer of the urns from the United States could take months.