Sommer was born in Berlin to Baron Peter von Schletz, a Lutheran minister, and his wife Renata, nee Topp. During the Second World War (in 1942) the family was evacuated to Niederndorf,\n', 'a village near Erlangen, a small university town in Franconia, where she attended the Gymnasium (high school). Her father died when she was 14 years old. She graduated from high school with an Abitur. After this, she moved to the UK to be an au pair, to perfect her English, and to earn a living. There, she also received some training as an interpreter.\n', 'She was spotted by film director Vittorio De Sica while on holiday in Italy, and started appearing in films there in 1958. It was also in this year that she changed her surname from \'Schletz\' to \'Sommer\' which was easier to pronounce for a non-German audience. 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, those for the September 1964 and December 1967 issues being most noteworthy.\n', 'She became one of the top film actresses of the 1960s 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), The Wrecking Crew (1968) with Dean Martin, and The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968); Sommer was the leading lady in each of these films.\n', '

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