Elke Sommer, the Pink Panther Star Who Went From a Bavarian Village to Hollywood, Has Died at 85, Just Days Before Her Birthday

Elke Sommer has died at the age of 85, just one week before what would have been her 86th birthday. The German born Hollywood star, best known to millions as Maria Gambrelli in the Pink Panther comedy A Shot in the Dark, died on Wednesday, October 28, at her home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her stepson, Sebastian Walther, shared the news with the German outlet Bild, which first reported her death.

According to the reports, Sommer died of heart failure and passed away peacefully at around 10 p.m. Her death comes only three months after the death of her husband of 32 years, hotelier Wolf Walther, who died in July after a battle with cancer. “Now she can finally be with her beloved husband again,” Sebastian Walther told Bild. A friend, Munich photographer Erwin Schneider, put it in similar terms, saying Sommer could never have imagined a life without her beloved “Papa Bear” and that now she has finally been able to join him.

It is a sad ending to a remarkable life, and one that began about as far from Hollywood glamour as it is possible to get. Sommer was born Elke Schletz in Berlin on November 5, 1940. She grew up in the countryside of northern Bavaria, in a small village surrounded by animals and trees. In a 1994 interview she described a childhood full of love, nature and good things, and that love of the outdoors stayed with her for the rest of her life. Even at the height of her fame, she said, most of her free time was spent outside in her yard, with rescue animals from the pound.

As a teenager, she had no plans to become an actress at all. She wanted to become an interpreter, and by her teens she could already speak six languages. She spent time in London working as an au pair. Then, on a holiday in Italy in 1958, everything changed. At just 17, she won the Miss Viareggio beauty contest. Her photographs caught the eye of the great Italian director Vittorio De Sica, and suddenly a girl who had planned a quiet life with languages was being offered a life in front of the camera.

From Italian comedies to Paul Newman and a Golden Globe

Sommer started out in Italian and German films in the early 1960s, learning her craft in comedies before Hollywood came calling. Her big American breakthrough arrived with The Prize in 1963, the Mark Robson directed drama starring Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson. Set during Nobel Prize week, the film gave Sommer a serious showcase, and the industry noticed. In 1964 she won the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer, the award then known as New Star of the Year for an actress.

That same year came the role that would define her for generations of film fans. In A Shot in the Dark, the second film in the Pink Panther series, Sommer played Maria Gambrelli, the maid framed for the murder of a chauffeur. The film paired her with Peter Sellers as the gloriously bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau, and their scenes together, including the romance between Maria and Clouseau, became part of comedy history. Directed by Blake Edwards, the film turned Sommer into an international star.

She later declined to return for the 1993 film Son of the Pink Panther, reportedly because Sellers had died in 1980 and, without him, the magic of that partnership could not be recreated. It was a telling decision from an actress who valued loyalty and feeling over a paycheck.

A career that refused to fit in one box

What made Sommer unusual, even in an era of versatile stars, was how many different kinds of work she took on. She starred opposite Bob Hope in the 1966 comedy Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! She appeared in The Oscar and in The Wrecking Crew in 1968 alongside Dean Martin. She moved between comedies, mysteries, thrillers and international productions with ease, helped by those six languages she had learned as a young woman.

Later credits included Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None in 1974 and the British comedy Carry On Behind in 1975, plus the horror film Baron Blood. All told, she built up roughly 100 film and television credits across a screen career that stretched for 58 years, from 1959 to her final credited acting role in 2017. She also worked on stage, sang, recorded music and became an accomplished painter, a second artistic life that mattered deeply to her.

Off screen, Sommer was married twice. In 1964 she married the famed Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, and they stayed together for 17 years before divorcing in 1981. Hyams later said the marriage had been the best 17 years of his life and that he had no regrets. She met her second husband, Wolf Walther, in 1989 while she was in New York starring in the play Tamara. She needed somewhere to stay for four months, and went to ask about a room at the Essex House hotel, only to find it had a new managing director. That man was Walther. As Sommer later told it, for him it was love at first sight, and for her it took only a little longer. They married and stayed together for 32 years.

In recent years, Sommer had stepped away from the spotlight. Reports say she had become bed bound in her final months, and her health declined after her husband’s death. Friends say her final wish was to be buried with him in Marloffstein, Germany, a return to the country where her extraordinary journey began.

Why Elke Sommer still matters

It is easy to remember Sommer only as a face from the golden age of Hollywood comedy, but that would sell her short. She was part of a generation of European actresses who crossed the Atlantic and reshaped what a Hollywood leading lady could be: multilingual, funny, glamorous and fiercely independent. She played maids accused of murder, diplomats, singers and schemers, and she did it in several languages and several countries.

She would have turned 86 on November 5. Instead, Hollywood has lost one of its last links to a vanished era, a woman who went from a tiny Bavarian village to the biggest sound stages in the world, and who never forgot where she came from. She lived a long, full, international life on her own terms, and she left behind work that people will keep watching for decades to come.

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Sources

Facts in this article are based on reporting by Page Six and Parade, both published October 29, 2026. Death details are reported by Bild via her stepson; no formal family statement has been published yet.