Lisa Singh is a writer who contributed cultural and arts criticism to The Weekly Standard between 2001 and 2016. Her pieces frequently explored film history, biography, and cultural topics, with a particular interest in figures from cinema and the Indian subcontinent.
Word has it that Mae West—that "plumber’s idea of Cleopatra," as W.C. Fields once wise-cracked—haunts her Hollywood estate; her reflection has been seen in the mirrors that in life she approached with the concentration of a card shark. In a world of haves and have-nots, West knew any man could be…
India After Gandhi
Gellhorn
Marlene Dietrich Photographs and Memories compiled by Jean-Jacques Naudet, edited by Maria Riva Knopf, 288 pp., $40 JUST SHORT of fifty and in the throes of an affair with Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich tried to get pregnant. She didn't succeed, but in the decades ahead, she reshaped her body to fit…
Poor Lois. Even her name seems old and unhip, hardly the right sound for a woman once hailed as a daring filmmaker. The critics' darling for a time around World War I, Lois Weber -- "Lois the Wizard," "the Wonder Girl" -- met her end without any fanfare. It was 1939 when America's first woman…