Obituary for film star Elke Sommer: A polygothic Franconian woman shakes up Hollywood with her aura

Her career, which – all things considered – is summed up in the term “Hollywood actress”, was quite unlikely. She had no intention of becoming an actress or even ever working as an artist. Born in Berlin at the beginning of November 1940, the daughter of a pastor's family, which did not mean that she was affected by too much evangelical narrowness.

Grew up in Erlangen, Franconia, dropped out shortly after completing secondary school on the way to graduating from high school – to become an interpreter. Wanting to move through whatever worlds in a multilingual way had the touch of not allowing oneself to be unpleasantly irritated by what might lie beyond one's own horizon. At the end of the 1950s, during a family vacation on the beaches of Tuscany, Elke Sommer took part in a beauty pageant and, as the legend goes, became “Miss Viareggio”.

The Italian star director Vittorio de Sica is said to have seen photos of this event in an illustrated magazine - that's how she came to the film with the debut "L'amico del giaguaro". Film, that was the business that enriched her with her roles until the 1970s: in Germany in 1959 in the film adaptation of B. Traven's "The Ship of the Dead", shortly afterwards in "The Day When the Rain Came", and in 1962 "The Public Prosecutor and the Girl".

In 1963, Sommer played in a Hollywood production for the first time - she tells the background about her first time in a remarkable conversation with Bayerischer Rundfunk in 1963. Interesting, just because of the way she speaks with confidence. She starred with Paul Newman, who was not very famous at the time, in The Price. The following year, the German was recognized as the best young actress with a “Golden Globe” award.

After Marlene Dietrich, Elke Sommer was the most famous German in the Hollywood casting files. She was considered uncomplicated, friendly and literally fun-loving. What her German colleagues dreamed of – Oh, when is Hollywood calling me? – she lived there herself. She didn't have what Germans in the USA are often said to have: too world-weary.

It didn't bother her that her character was considered frivolous, lewd and overly provocative. In a conversation with the Mallorca Zeitung eight years ago, she said: "People also wanted to see that in me, the supposed sex bomb - so idiotic! I've always hated the term, my whole life. What is that, sexy? Sexy is such a shitty word. Sexy is nothing, tits and ass. Attractive, erotic is something else. It's movements, eyes, the aura, how you treat someone."

The fact that she was scandalized (not only in this country) in the still draconian 1960s also contributed to the success of her business. She was fine with wearing a two-piece bikini. Too revealing? "No, none of us were aware of that. For me, the two-piece suit was just wardrobe." And the constantly agitated churches that publicly advised against watching Elke Sommer films in the cinema? "Really? I'm a pastor's daughter and very religious myself."

In Hollywood she appeared in a wealth of films, in a part of the Pink Panther series (alongside Peter Sellers as the goofy Inspector Clouseau) called “The Shot in the Dark” (1964): It was one of the funniest performances of those often fractious years. Sommer was the real attraction of this film; her talent for making every snippet of speech sound spontaneously uttered was enormous.

As great as Sommer's art, making even the most skimpy textile furnishings look like the most natural thing in the world, devoid of any vulgarity. In terms of film, perhaps her best piece was “Hot Cats” in 1966, a sensationally entertaining, yet graceful trash production devoid of any pretensions to art. A James Bond parody in which she and her colleague Sylvia Koscina play a killer bee duo full of clattering and banging. In the end, a bomb in the artificial hairpiece of one of them causes a strange end.

Quentin Tarantino, who has a devout heart for the non-art-religious cinema films of those years, honored this and other summer films in his 2019 film “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood”: There is no more real fame for a German film star.

At the end of the 1970s she withdrew from big business and lived as a painter in Erlangen and Los Angeles. She worked so much that she could afford to live in both places - living in Southern California is of course easier in the winter. Sommer was a little off the radar of those directors who wanted a different German cinema, and Fassbinder wasn't really on their radar either.

Age-appropriate roles weren't really found either. Perhaps it shouldn't be understood that Elke Sommer brought glamor as a person. A few months after the death of Wolf Walther, her companion and second husband, she died in Bel Air at the age of 85.