Elke Sommer

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Elke Sommer 1965

Elke Sommer (born November 5, 1940 in Berlin ; actually Elke Schletz ) is a German actress , singer and painter who appeared in almost 100 film and television roles from 1959. In the 1960s she made the leap to Hollywood as a sex symbol , a novelty for a German actress. Her best-known films include the Blake Edwards comedy A Shot in the Dark alongside Peter Sellers from 1964, which is part of the Pink Panther series .

Life

Elke Sommer was born under the name Elke Schletz as the only child of Renata Topp and the Protestant pastor Peter Schletz. Her family was evacuated from Berlin to Niederndorf (Herzogenaurach) in Franconia in 1942 . She lost her father at the age of 14. She left grammar school without a high school diploma just one year after completing secondary school.

During an au pair stay in London , she received foreign language training and wanted to become an interpreter . Today she speaks six languages ​​fluently. In 1964 she moved to Beverly Hills in the USA and married the journalist and writer Joe Hyams . In 1970 she posed for Playboy ; She was photographed by her husband. The marriage, which suffered a total of three miscarriages during the summer, ended in divorce in 1981. In 1993 she married the hotelier Wolf Walther, who was eight years her junior. The second marriage also remained childless. However, her husband has two grown children, Sebastian and Caroline.

Career

Elke Sommer with Tom Barcal (2018)

During a vacation in 1958 with her mother in Italy , she was surprisingly voted Miss this place in a café in the city of Viareggio . Because of the subsequently published photos of "Miss Viareggio", which caused a sensation, the Italian film producer Vittorio De Sica brought her to Rome .

In the same year, 1958, the first Italian film was made with her. She changed her name to summer because, in her opinion, Schletz sounded too difficult for audiences abroad. In 1959 she got a three-year contract from the Berlin producer Artur Brauner and shot her first German film Das Totenschiff at the side of Horst Buchholz . In 1962 she made the leap to Hollywood . In total, she appeared in more than 70 cinema and television films; however, she did not make the big breakthrough. During training for the filming of The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz , during which she had to jump the Berlin Wall as a GDR pole vaulter, she trained for weeks at UCLA three to four hours a day with a sports teacher from the university in 1967 . Since 1966 she made a name for herself under the pseudonym “E. Schwartz ”as a painter and presented her works in exhibitions all over the world. Painting is her main profession today.

Most of the time she was committed to the role of the blonde sex bomb in the films. Occasionally she was confused as a person with her film roles, but mostly identified with the (equally stereotypical) educated Franconian pastor's daughter. Oswalt Kolle and Siegfried Sommer , for example, used the term Erlanger pastor's daughter for summer. In 1975, in the “Year of Women” of the UN , she defended nudity against shame in a dispute with the conductor Hortense von Gelmini in the program The Hot Wire ( hosted by Joachim Fuchsberger ).

In addition to her film career, she appeared on numerous American talk shows , also in the Muppet Show (1978) and began acting in the theater from 1970 . Sommer's attempt to exploit her fame through the film for a career in singing began with failure . A second attempt, supported years later by Gert Wilden , to gain a foothold in the music sector, was a great success. She sang in eight languages on the folk album You, You Lie in My Heart . Several more music albums followed.

Filmography

Synchronizations

Discography

Singles

  • 1961: Be not notty / The Faithful Hussar
  • 1962: We are friends / darling
  • 1962: Adieu, Adieu / The phone went off at night
  • 1964: Cowboy-Shake / Hey, hey, hey, I'm looking for a boy
  • 1965: I say no / it could be
  • 1965: Hully-Gully Italiano / Miss Cumberland
  • 1965: That's not enough for me / Oh, I Love You
  • 1965: It was a summer in Normandy / I'm walking along the beach
  • 1970: I can live just fine without you / As long as the world keeps turning
  • 1972: So bang on fall / tears in the sand

EP

  • 1973: I need you so much

Albums

  • 1965: Love in Any Language ( MGM , USA)
  • 1965: I love you ( Polydor , Germany)
  • 1972: You, you are close to my heart (PoP, Germany)
  • 1977: Elke Sommer (Cantagallo, Germany)
  • 1999: That alone can't be everything (CD)

Radio plays

  • 2001: A Kingdom for a Lama - The original radio play for the film , Walt Disney Records, ISBN 3-89780-162-0

Awards

Web links

Commons : Elke Sommer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.welt.de/kultur/article10750882/Elke-Sommer-die-Sauerkraut-Bardot-wird-70.html
  2. ↑ https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch?explore=title_type&role=nm0813961&ref_=filmo_ref_job_typ&sort=num_votes,desc&mode=detail&page=1&title_type=movie
  3. ↑ Elke Sommer: The official website - curriculum vitae, page 3. In: elkesommeronline.com. Accessed December 31, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Personal details . In: Der Spiegel 16/1967 , April 10, 1967
  5. ↑ Elke Sommer . ( Memento of the original from October 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Sächsische Zeitung , November 5, 2005 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sz-online.de
  6. ↑ A big thing brings in more . In: Der Spiegel . No. 1 , 1968, p. 84 ( online - taking over an interview with Sommer in the Münchner Abendzeitung ).
  7. ↑ Oswalt Kolle: I am so free: my life . Rowohlt, Berlin 2008, p. 128
  8. ↑ Karl Borromäus Glock: "Eighty Years - Encounters with a Hundred Well-Known Contemporaries", Nuremberg 1985, p. 31 "When Fuchsberger once ... collected the favorite self-portrayal of well-known artists on television, Elke Sommer pleaded for nudity, Hortense von Gelmini - von Fuchsberger asked about a possible alternative, said only two words: The shame "
  9. ↑ Award ceremony 2019
personal data
SURNAME Summer, Elke
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schletz, Elke (maiden name); E. Schwartz (pseudonym as painter)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actress, singer, director and painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin , Germany