Elke Sommer

As of 2004, she lives in Los Angeles, California. She died at Easton, Connecticut, of ovarian cancer. Her artwork shows strong influence from Marc Chagall. Camilla (1994) was to be her last performance, and it was bold in one way that she, at the age of about 85, had a brief nude scene. While continuing to act sometimes, since the 1990s she has concentrated on painting. She subsequently earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work in the grass-roots hit Fried Green Tomatoes (1992), and co-starred in The Story Lady (1991 telefilm, with daughter Tandy Cronyn), Used People (1992, as Shirley MacLaine's Jewish mother), To Dance With the White Dog (1993 telefilm, with Cronyn), Nobody's Fool (1994), and Camilla (also 1994, with Cronyn). She performed as a singer, making several LP records. She and Cronyn had been working together more and more, on stage and television, to continued acclaim (notably in 1987's Foxfire which won her an Emmy Award recreating her Tony-winning Broadway role), but it was her colorful performance in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), as an aging, stubborn Southern matron, that made her a bonafide Hollywood star and earned her a Best Actress Academy_award.

She became one of the most popular pin-up girls of the time, and posed for several pictorials in Playboy Magazine. The beginning of the 1970s saw a resurgence in her film career, with character roles in The World According to Garp, Best Friends, Still of the Night (all 1982) and The Bostonians (1984), and the hit film Cocoon (1985), opposite Cronyn, with whom she reteamed for *Batteries not included (1987) and Cocoon: The Return (1988). She quickly became a noted sex symbol and moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s. After her Tony-winning performance as Blanche DuBois in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, she concentrated on the stage and only appeared sporadically in films such as The Light in the Forest (1957) and The Birds (1963). She started appearing in films in Italy in the late 1950s. She made her American film debut in The Seventh Cross (1944), and appeared in The Valley of Decision (1945), The Green Years (1946, as Cronyn's daughter!), and Forever Amber (1947). Sommer was born as Elke Schletz in Berlin. Following her first marriage to actor Jack Hawkins, she moved to New York and met actor Hume Cronyn, who became her second husband and frequent partner on stage and screen.

Elke Sommer (born 5 November 1940) is a German born actor, entertainer, and artist. She also worked in British films. From a young age she was determined to be an actress, and first appeared on the London stage in 1927, playing, among others, Katherine opposite Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Cordelia opposite John Gielgud's King Lear. After an acting career spanning some 65 years, Tandy found latter-day movie stardom in big-budget, major-studio releases and intimate dramas alike. Jessica won a Tony Award in 1982 for Foxfire, in 1978 for The Gin Game, and in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire.

Later the same year, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She is the mother of actress Tandy Cronyn, and was chosen by People magazine as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the world in 1990. Jessica Tandy (June 7, 1909 – September 11, 1994) was a British-born American actress who was born in London. 1992: Fried Green Tomatoes.

1989: Driving Miss Daisy. Cocoon the Return. 1988: The House on Carroll Street