From Erlangen to Beverly Hills

he speaks several languages fluently, feels equally at home in Los Angeles or Berlin, and she has very gracefully made the transition from cinema sexpot to mature artist and wife. Today Elke Sommer lives in Southern California, enjoying her passion for painting, playing golf, and traveling to Germany now and then to appear in stage productions such as “Jedermann” in Berlin (2003).

Elke Sommer with her second husband,
hotelier Wolf Walther in July 2003.
PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

Sommer's film career began rather by accident in 1958 during a summer vacation with her mother in Italy. Eighteen-year-old Elke won the title of “Miss Viareggio Turistica.” A film offer followed, and because the money she was offered would pay for her tuition to study as an interpreter, she soon found herself on a movie set in Rome. Although she originally had no acting ambitions, her minor role as Grete in the Italian comedy L' amico del giaguaro (1958) and other Italian films led to her first German movie: Das Totenschiff (1959).

Her first leading role came in the English-language film Don't Bother to Knock (1960), but Sommer's international breakthrough came about with the British-American production The Victors (1963), in which she appeared along with other European actresses, including Romy Schneider and Melina Mercouri. Her acting work to date includes over 90 films and some 40 theater productions, plus numerous television shows — in the U.S. and Europe.

Das deutsche Fräuleinwunder

Elke Sommer was born Elke Schletz on November 5, 1940 in Berlin-Spandau to parents Peter Schletz and Renata Topp. Her father was a Lutheran minister. By 1942 the Allies had brought the war to Germany, and Berlin was not a safe place to be. Two-year-old Elke moved with her family to Niederndorf, a small town near Erlangen and Nuremberg. Growing up in Niederndorf, Elke collected an assortment of pets and began learning to paint with water colors.

Her father died when she was only 14, but Elke later graduated from a Gymnasium in Erlangen, a secondary school with a rigorous curriculum that included Greek and Latin. The linguistically talented student planned to study to become a diplomatic intrepreter. She spent a year in London as an au pair learning English.

But her 1958 trip to Italy changed her career plans radically. Soon she was learning languages by working as an actress on movie sets in various countries. In 1963 Sommer went to Hollywood to work on the motion picture The Prize with Paul Newman.

Elke met the writer and journalist Joe Hyams at a party honoring The Prize, and they were married in 1964. For a long time theirs was indeed “a Hollywood marriage that works” (the title of a story in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1975), but by the time Hyams filed for divorce in 1981, Elke's frequent absences for her film work had taken their toll. She was in Munich working on Inside the Third Reich around the time of their divorce.

In August 1993 Elke Sommer married hotelier Wolf Walther, vowing to be a more nuturing wife in her second marriage. In her Bel Air home, Sommer works on the paintings that have brought her increasing artistic recognition.

Next, Elke Sommer's artwork...

N E X T > Elke's Artwork

Copyright © 2003-2005 Hyde Flippo