‘A Shot In The Dark’ Star Elke Sommer Has Died At 85, Months After Losing Her Husband

• Elke Sommer, the Golden Globe-winning actress known for A Shot in the Dark, has died at 85, just days before her 86th birthday.
• She died at her Bel Air home on Oct. 28; Bild reported the cause as heart failure after a long period confined to bed.
• Sommer rose from postwar Germany to Hollywood stardom, appearing opposite Peter Sellers, Paul Newman, Bob Hope and Dean Martin before later devoting much of her life to painting.

Elke Sommer, the Berlin-born blonde who played the maid Maria Gambrelli opposite Peter Sellers in A Shot in the Dark, died on Wednesday, October 28, at her home in Bel Air, Los Angeles. She was 85, and she would have turned 86 on Thursday, November 5. Her stepson, Sebastian Walther, shared the news with the German paper Bild, and the Associated Press reported that Los Angeles police responded that night to the death of an 85-year-old woman on her block.

Bild reported that she died of heart failure after a long stretch confined to bed, and family photographer Erwin Schneider told the paper, “Elke passed away peacefully around 10 p.m.” Her death came only three months after a loss that had already broken her heart, and before it, a Hollywood career that included a Golden Globe, two Playboy pictorials and one of the strangest celebrity feuds of the 1980s.

How Did A Minister’s Daughter From Berlin Become A Hollywood Star?

She was born Elke von Schletz on November 5, 1940, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, and her family left wartime Berlin in 1942 for a small Franconian village near Erlangen. Her father died when she was 14. A few years later she quit school with her mother’s blessing and went to London as an au pair, and it was on a holiday in Italy that the director Vittorio De Sica spotted her, according to her biography. By 1958 she was making Italian films and had traded Schletz for Sommer.

Hollywood came calling in the early 1960s. Playing opposite Paul Newman in The Prize (1963) won her the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year, and a year later Blake Edwards cast her in A Shot in the Dark, the Pink Panther sequel in which Inspector Clouseau falls for the very maid he is supposed to suspect of murder. She went on to work with Bob Hope in Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! and Dean Martin in The Wrecking Crew, and British fans remember her in Carry On Behind. She never pretended the job was anything but glamour. “They shouldn’t be the girl next door,” she said of movie stars in a 1967 interview the AP quoted this week. In a 2014 conversation with Film Talk she put it more simply: “I was always playing, and the only thing I could bring was my energy.”

That energy was about to land her in a very different kind of spotlight.

What Started Her Feud With Zsa Zsa Gabor?

It began, of all places, on the set of Circus of the Stars in 1984. Sommer later recalled watching Zsa Zsa Gabor being helped onto a horse backstage, and her verdict was two words long: “Poor horse.” Gabor’s lawyer, Neil C. Newsom, said his client resented the claim that she had a “rather big behind” and needed four people to get her into the saddle, Remind Magazine reported.

The grudge simmered for six years and then boiled over in the German press. In 1990, according to the court record and the Associated Press, Gabor was quoted in two German publications saying that Sommer was broke and was reduced to selling hand-knitted sweaters to make a living, while Gabor’s husband, Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, told a reporter that Sommer lied about her age and looked far older than she claimed. For an actress who had always sold glamour, it was the worst kind of insult, and she said so in court.

Who Won When The Feud Went To Court?

Sommer sued Gabor and von Anhalt for libel and defamation and asked for $10 million. At the 1993 trial in Los Angeles she testified that the stories had humiliated her and cost her work. The jury agreed. It found that both defendants had acted with malice and ordered them to pay her $3.3 million, as the AP and Remind Magazine both reported. Gabor and her husband appealed, and in 1995 a California appeals court ruled in Sommer v. Gabor that the statements were not protected opinion and that the damages were not excessive.

Gabor, who had spent decades as a talk-show favorite and a guest on Green Acres alongside her sister Eva, died on December 18, 2016, at 99. Sommer, by then, had turned most of her energy to painting, with a style heavily influenced by Marc Chagall, and in 2001 she was given a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars. You can see how other screen beauties of her era looked back on those years in our story on Britt Ekland, who was married to Peter Sellers.

Why Her Final Months Were So Hard

The great love of her later life was Wolf Walther, a German hotelier she met in 1989 while performing in the play Tamara in New York, where he ran the Essex House. They married in Franconia on August 29, 1993, the same year she won her case. Walther died on July 22, 2026, at 77, after a long fight with cancer, according to Bild and the Swiss outlet blue News. “My heart is broken,” Sommer said after losing him.

Before he died, Bild reported, Walther asked his son Sebastian to promise that he would look after her, and Sebastian kept that promise through her last bedridden weeks. When the end came, three months and six days after his father’s, he did not talk about films or feuds or Golden Globes. “Now she can finally be with her beloved husband again,” he said.