Career
Sommer was born in Berlin to a Lutheran minister and his wife. After World War II, the family was evacuated to Erlangen, a small university town in Southern Germany, where, despite their lack of money, she attended the prestigious Gymnasium (high school) in Erlangen. However her father's death when she was 14 precluded further formal education, and she moved to England to be an au pair, to perfect her English and earn a living.
She was spotted by film director Vittorio De Sica whilst on holiday in Italy, and started appearing in films there in the late 1950s. She quickly became a noted sex symbol and moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s. 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).
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.
In 1964, she won the Golden Globe Awards as Most Promising Newcomer Actress for The Prize, a film she co-starred with Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson.
In 1972, she starred in two Italian horror movies directed by Mario Bava, which have both become cult classics Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil. The latter film was never theatrically distributed in its original form; it was later re-edited (with 1975 footage inserted) to make a different movie called House of Exorcism. Sommer went back to Italy to star in the additional scenes that were inserted into the movie by its producer, against the wishes of the director.
In 1975, Peter Rogers cast her in Carry On Behind as the Russian Professor Vrooshka. She became the Carry On's highest paid performer, at £30,000 (an honour shared with Phil Silvers for Follow That Camel).
Sommer also performed successfully as a singer, making several albums.
Read more about this topic: Elke Sommer
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)