Biography
This page uses content from the Elke Sommer biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.
Elke Sommer [IPA: ɛlkə zɔmɐ] (born 5 November, 1940) is a German born actress, entertainer, and artist.
Sommer was born as Elke Schletz in Berlin. She started appearing in films in Italy in the late 1950s. She quickly became a noted sex symbol and moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s.
She became one of the most popular pin-up girls of the time, and posed for several pictorials in Playboy Magazine.
She became one of the top movie actresses of the 1960s and made 99 movie and television appearances between 1959 and 2005, including A Shot in the Dark (1964) with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, The Art of Love (1965) with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, The Oscar (1966) with Stephen Boyd, Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number! (1966) with Bob Hope, the Bulldog Drummond extravaganza Deadlier Than the Male (1966), and The Wrecking Crew (1969) with Dean Martin; Sommer was the leading lady in each of these films.
She also performed as a singer, making several LP records.
In 1975, Peter Rogers cast her in Carry On Behind as Russian professor Vrooshka. She became the Carry On's highest paid performer, at £30,000 (a honour shared with Phil Silvers for Follow That Camel)
While continuing to act sometimes, since the 1990s she has concentrated on painting. As an actress she worked in half a dozen countries learning the language (she speaks seven different languages) and storing up images which she would later express on canvas. Her artwork shows strong influence from Marc Chagall. As of 2004, she lives in Los Angeles, California.
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