​Raised in Romania and Ecuador, Elisa became fluent in four languages which helped her perform around the world and land on the cover of Life magazine, where she was hailed as an “international actress.”

She began her career on British television, then sang in a French nightclub where she was discovered by a Hungarian film director seeking a "French existentialist" for a German movie.

After co-starring in several films in Germany, she moved to Mexico, where she acted in American and Mexican movies and television — writing an episode of one TV series herself — and theatre. There she was discovered by the American playwright Theodore Apstein who brought her to New York to play a Mexican peasant in his play Come Share My House, for which she won the Theatre World and Obie Awards.

Theatre World Award Winners ceremony, featuring: (top row) Warren Beatty, John McMartin, Daniel Blum, Laurence Harvey, Dick Van Dyke, Donald Madden,
​(bottom row) Anita Gillette, Carol Burnett, Lauri Peters, Patty Duke, Eileen Brennan, Elisa Loti, and Jane Fonda

On Broadway, she appeared with Zero Mostel in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros. She co-starred with Richard Burton in Hemingway's The Fifth Column (CBS).

Her other TV credits include a recurring role in the soap From These Roots (NBC) and an appearance on the Jack Paar Tonight Show where she spoke in multiple accents. She was featured in the movie Claudine with Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones and has played opposite film stars including Cesar Romero, Resortes, and Heinz Rühmann. ​

Elisa's happiest collaboration was directing and acting in her husband Joseph Stein's play Enter Laughing. She is currently a practicing psychotherapist in New York City and working on a memoir about her remarkable life. You can see her read from her work-in-progress below: ​

And... see her dancing  with Resortes in Manos Arriba here: