Collection: Elke Sommer Artist Biography and Art Gallery Collection

Elke Sommer, born Elke Baronesse von Schletzb on November 5 1940, in Berlin, Germany, is a German actress, singer, director and artist who starred in many Hollywood films. She was spotted by film director Vittorio De Sica while on holiday in Italy, and started appearing in films there in the late 1950's. She quickly became a noted sex symbol and moved to Hollywood in the early 1960's. She also became one of the most popular pin-up girls of the time, and posed for several pictorials in Playboy magazine (September 1964 and December 1967). Elke Sommer became one of the top film actresses of the 1960's and made 99 film 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 (1968) with Dean Martin; Sommer was the leading lady in each of these films. In addition to being an actress, she was a popular sex symbol of the era.  Elke Sommer was compared to such other screen sirens as Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot.

Since the 1990's, Elke Sommer has concentrated more on painting than on acting. As an actress, she worked in half a dozen countries learning the languages (she speaks seven languages) and storing up images which she has subsequently expressed on canvas. Her artwork shows a strong Marc Chagall influence. From early childhood on, she was interested in the arts, and painting has always been her passion. The veteran actress has since focused more time on book writing and painting than she has on acting. Holding her first one-woman art show at the McKenzie Galleries in Beverly Hills in 1965, her artwork bears an exceptionally strong influence to Marc Chagall and she, at one point, hosted a mid-1980's PBS series ("Painting with Elke"), that centered on her artwork, which has now exhibited and sold for more than 40 years.  She once said, "I'd rather be known as a painter who acts than as an actress who paints." Over the years, her work has appeared in numerous shows at galleries and museums around the world and carries on aspects of traditional German folk art.