Biography

Elisa Loti was hailed as an "continental actress" on the cover of Life magazine. Raised in Romania and Ecuador, she became fluent in four languages, which helped her perform around the world. Her career began on British television. She 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 acted in 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. On Broadway, she appeared with Zero Mostel in the revival of Ionesco's Rhinocerous. She co-starred with Richard Burton in Hemingway's The Fifth Column for CBS (dir. John Frankenheimer), was featured in the movie Claudine with Dianne Carroll and James Earl Jones, and has played opposite actors including Cesar Romero, Heinz Rühmann, and Resortes. She was married to the late Tony Award-winning playwright Joseph Stein.