[1] She attended the State Academy of Theatre in Warsaw and was advised by the dean that in order to play leading roles in romantic repertory theater, she should undergo plastic surgery to reduce the size of her breasts.

[citation needed] Not a "method" actor, she did not try to disappear into characters or let her beauty wholly define her succession of screen and stage parts.

By now internationally recognized as one of Poland's top young actors, [citation needed] she expanded her artistic range in two film dramas: Unloved (1965) by Janusz Nasfeter and Wajda's Everything for Sale (1968).

Unloved, set shortly before the outbreak of World War II, tells the story of a young Jewish woman's love affair.

Czyżewska's career was disrupted, and when she returned in 1968 at Wajda's invitation to play in his film Everything for Sale, production was complicated by the March outbreak of student protests and the start of the communist government's antisemitic expulsions.

Czyżewska was expelled, and partly because she promptly accepted a role in exiled director Aleksander Ford's adaptation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, she was unable to work in Poland until 1980, when Lech Wałęsa's Solidarność movement had great influence.

In the film, an exiled European movie star played by Sally Kirkland struggles to find work in New York City following her divorce from a well-connected intellectual, presumably based on Halberstam.

[6] Czyżewska's final leading role was in the film June Weddings, adapted from a play written and directed by Barbara Hammond, which brought her great critical praise on the film-festival circuit.

The Baltimore City Paper wrote that "The delightful Elzbieta Czyzewska plays a Russian woman so slyly, seductively Old World and languorous she gives 'v' its own beat when she says 'love'."