The journey from page to screen for Lee began with a table that had been the centerpiece in the kitchen of the house where Lee Miller had many joy-filled summers in Cornwall with the likes of Roland, Max Ernst, Noel Coward and Paul Éluard to name a few. During those hedonistic summers of love, these artists would prepare meals, eat, discuss ideas and create at this table and acquiring it set Kate Winslet on her own subsequent creative journey as producer and taking on the role of Lee Miller.
Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller, born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York was, as Winslet explains, “An unstoppable force of nature with a tremendous lust for life.” Discovered by Conde Nast himself, she had a brief career as a model and worked for many publications including Vogue, before quickly tiring of being viewed through the male gaze and scrutinized in front of a lens. She switched careers and moved to Paris where she studied surrealist photography under Man Ray. It was Lee who discovered the technique known as solarisation, (something Man Ray long took credit for). She soon set up her own studio and began to work as a successful photographer in her own right.
Some years later, an introduction to the Englishman and Art Dealer Roland Penrose changed things again. Roland and Lee fell madly in love and she swiftly left her former life behind and moved to England to be with him in his home in London. This was at the outbreak of WWII.
Lee Miller, as a middle aged woman in a man’s world, refused to sit still and dutifully ‘do her bit’ as was expected of all women in England during the war, instead she decided to challenge the patriarchy and overcame enormous obstacles before eventually travelling to the frontline in Europe, alone, to begin photographing and reporting on the war for the female readers of British Vogue.
Her profound understanding of women and the plight of the voiceless victims of war and displacement, combined with her ability to capture fragility and ferocity in equal delicate measure, created her extraordinary WWII images and other work and gave her a rightful place in history as one of the most significant photographers of the 20th Century.
Lee Miller’s legacy consists of over 60,000 images & documents. The Lee Miller Archives (LMA) houses a diverse collection of images from Surrealist photography and Vogue fashion editorials to World War II photojournalism and portraits of the some of the most important figures of the 20th Century.
It was a chance moment that led to an encounter with a part of Lee Miller’s past that was the catalyst for Kate Winslet to embark on her journey of the film. As she explains, “Nine years ago a really good friend of mine who lives in Cornwall and works as a researcher for an auction house, phoned me and said, ‘Kate, there’s an amazing table in an upcoming auction and you just have to bid on it, the story behind it is incredible!’ Knowing my love of cooking and hosting big dinners, and my love of old tables, my friend knew this would fire up my intrigue. So, I bought it. It’s beautiful. It’s old and gnarly, with a rough uneven surface. Seats about eight!”
Directed by renowned and award-winning cinematographer Ellen Kuras, making her narrative feature directing debut, and written by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume, Lee has a taut, transfixing pace, with striking detail throughout. Featuring superb supporting performances from Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Andy Samberg and Alex Skarsgard, the film is a vivid reminder of the bold women who fought to penetrate male-dominated spaces — making great sacrifices and ultimately changing the way we see the world. It’s a fascinating portrait of the great American war correspondent Lee Miller, whose singular talent and ferocious tenacity gave us some of the 20th century’s most indelible images.
Uncovering more about Lee Miller posed a burning question for Kate Winslet, “Why had no one made a film about her?”
Winslet was determined to find out more. She contacted Antony Penrose, (Lee Miller and Roland Penrose’s son), and he told her, “Many men have tried to make a film about Lee, we have a whole box of screenplays in the attic that have never been made.” When asked by Winslet why that was, Antony replied, “they just didn’t quite get her.”
Winslet realized early on that perhaps the real Lee couldn’t be found in any of the historical books written about her. It turned out she was right.
Working extremely closely with Antony Penrose over the years that followed, Winslet began the lengthy creative process of finding a way into Miller’s extraordinary life. Using Antony’s book, The Lives of Lee Miller as a starting point, Winslet set about understanding the deeper sides of Lee. Granted full and complete access to the Lee Miller Archives, Winslet discovered the complexities of this brilliant, warm, charismatic, bold woman. Digging all the way back to her childhood and how that informed so much of her ability to live life at full throttle. Often viewed as the model and muse, Winslet quickly realized that the public persona of Lee was in vast contrast to reality of this determined, powerful, yet flawed middle aged woman who had the courage to take risks and head off to the frontline, completely alone.
The structure for the screenplay was going to be the biggest challenge. “Lee lived many lives and deciding on the most defining period of her life was the biggest challenge we faced,” says Winslet, “we kept telling ourselves, this cannot fall into the trap of being a biopic. We just weren’t interested in that story structure. Plus, it would have been impossible to tell the cradle-to-grave story of Lee Miller as a feature film, because she reinvented herself so many times across her entire lifetime.”
The film wisely did not set out to be a biopic as Penrose explains, “What the producers have done is to select the most salient moments of Lee’s life that accurately represent her personality.” As producer Kate Solomon says, “It’s not about the drama of Lee’s life, but rather, it’s about her inner life, how she felt and what drove her forward. It’s a story about a woman, a human being with a heart and a soul, and how the horrors of war affected her.”
For Winslet, focusing the screenplay on a particular decade of Miller’s life was a way “To get rid of all the preconceived ideas about Lee Miller as the model and the subject of many male artists’ gaze.” We wanted to tell the absolute truth of who Lee was and who she became through her experience of photographing the war, and that began to unfold as Winslet shares, “when we focused on her middle aged years as a female photographer who worked for British Vogue and went to the frontline as a war correspondent during World War II— that’s when we felt this would be the specific decade of her life that we wanted to focus on.”
Solomon explains; “It was about finding the period in her life that tells the crux of what she is about and, for Lee, that period is the ten years which take her from the pre-war sunlit days of the south of France where she spent time with her artistic friends, through to the heart of darkness of Dachau.”
The challenge was working out how in the script they could move from all of these varied moments of her life and transition between them in a way that keeps the audience connected to Lee’s internal emotional journey as a woman in a man’s world, as she sees the horrors of war unfold before her eyes. Employing the device of having a young man, played by Josh O’Connor, interview a much older Miller (also played by Winslet) about her younger life, enabled the team to shape the screenplay’s narrative and anchor it in a place of reflection and emotional resonance. As Penrose explains, “Observing Lee, in the later stages of her life, being interviewed about the photographs from her past allows us into her inner emotional world and allows us to move with her as the young journalist discovers her past. It gave us a very accurate way of being able to move from one event in her life to the next.” Winslet concurs, “When that element fell into place, it felt as though we had a workable structure for a truthful movie.”
Discovering what drove Lee Miller, unveiled to Winslet what an utterly unstoppable woman she was and how relevant her story is today, “She was a lifeforce to be reckoned with, so much more than an object of attention from the famous men with whom she is associated. This woman was a photographer, writer, and reporter. She did everything with love, lust, and courage. She is an inspiration for what you can achieve, what you can bear, and what you can do if you dare to take life firmly by the hands and live it at full throttle.”
With pre-production revving up, Winslet began to go deeper into the actual playing of the role and as she says, “Lee Miller was a truth-seeker and a truth-teller. That was the thing that drove her and that was the reason she wanted to reveal the truth of the atrocities of the Nazi regime. She was a woman who was so intrinsically true to who she was, even though at times there was an enormous emotional and personal cost. She held up a mirror to the many horrific faces of evil, whilst being a selfless, defiant observer herself. It was these qualities that attracted Winslet to play Miller and drove her to tell her story as she explains, “I’m just so taken by her, how she lived, how she didn’t care what people thought of her, or her choices and opinions, how she was free with her affections, her ability to connect with other women and in revealing the truth, speaking the truth and encouraging other people how to do exactly that! That’s everything I live for, and Lee Miller was already doing it years before I was and way better than everybody and certainly better than me. To be playing someone who I truly admire, adore, look up to, and aspire to be even a little bit like, is the most enormous privilege.”
Spending a lot of time with Winslet during the pre-production period, Penrose discovered there were many similarities between Kate and his late mother Lee. The two women’s parallels extended far beyond aesthetics as he explains, “Talking to Kate, little things often came filtering into our conversation that were just unnervingly similar to what Lee would have said, Kate would ask the same questions Lee would have asked, always digging beneath the surface layer and wanting to know why and how. There’s an immersive quality in Kate that was also very present in Lee. If Lee wanted to figure out how to break into a locked up building she’d do it, or if she wanted find out how to cook a new dish, she would go into the most incredible detail to learn how and, by the end of it, she would have known as much as any master chef. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that Kate has towards Lee and to this movie. No stone was ever left unturned. And when she’d turned them all over, she’d go off and find more!”
Lee Miller lived so many lives, reinventing herself in a desire to be free of stereotypes, to know more, learn more, and be more. To be a leader amongst women and as she famously said, “I’d rather take a picture than be one.” She was an incredible woman, it is therefore no surprise that Winslet wanted to tell her story and to be the one to bring her extraordinary achievements and her overwhelming emotional journey to light.
As Penrose explains, “Lee Miller didn’t take no for an answer, and she got things done.” It was with this same energy and spirit that Kate Winslet led the film into pre-production as fellow producer Kate Solomon explains, “Kate put this film together the way Lee Miller put things together, with a passion and energy that gathered people and made them feel that they’re going on an adventure with her.” Castmate Andy Samberg agrees, “Kate’s been trying to make this happen for a little over eight years, because she believes it is important. I’m sure plenty of people have said no to her the same way people said no to Lee but like her she didn’t let that stop her and because of that tenacity it’s now been made.”
With the script in place the next creative decision was which of Miller’s original photographs to include in the film. As Winslet explains, “Only when it was clear what our story structure was, did we then go in search of the images that Lee had taken to fit those key moments.” Key moments like Hitler’s apartment and Dachau were crucial, but there were also the images of the suicides in Leipzig when entire Nazi families killed themselves that they wanted to include, as Winslet says, “there’s a very famous image of the Bürgermeister’s daughter taken by Lee, where she is so close to this young 15-year-old girl’s face, which looks like a Dresden doll, that you can clearly see her perfect pretty little teeth. This Nazi child had been forced to take her own life by her father, it’s a horrific and devastating image.” It was these images that set Miller apart as an exceptional war photographer and were therefore important to include in the film, not only to show her skills behind the camera but also to reveal something of the woman she was. “It’s powerful and brave work” Winslet explains, “and that’s where her work really stood out. Miller refused to allow things to be covered up, partly because she herself was covering up a trauma of her own youth, but also because she truly felt compelled to reveal to as many people as she possibly could the atrocities of the Nazi regime. And she did.”
For Penrose including these images in the film was not only a helpful story device but “A wonderful celebration of her work” and allows the audience to discover far more about Miller, as he explains, “the key thing that defines her photography is compassion, and that comes from somebody who knew what suffering really felt like. She knew what it was like to be marginalised, to be badly treated. She knew what it was like to be in danger and that comes through in her photography.” Miller herself was badly abused at a very young age, but rather than allowing it to destroy her, instead she was able to lay the foundations for an empathy that she used as a way of understanding the world around her.
Often the casting process for a film begins once a director is on board but, as with so many aspects of this film, many of the creative decisions had already been made by Winslet before Kuras came on. Given that Winslet had been working on the project for several years, she had a very clear vision for the project as Kuras explains, “Kate really put the whole thing together and has been phenomenal in shaping the vision for the film.”
The production completed filming in November 2022 with two days filming in London. Just as in Miller’s story, the production had at last returned home and brought with them their memories of the shoot. For Winslet, it was the end of an eight-year journey discovering Miller, “Coming into this, I thought: I must be my absolute freest self because that’s who Lee was. People loved Lee, she drove men wild, with no makeup and looking like an unmade bed, she was just irresistibly true to herself. And that’s what I’ve wanted to really encapsulate in playing her, this messy, haphazard, middle-aged sometimes catastrophic woman who knew how to stand on her own two feet and say, ‘this is me, yes.’
There’s something unbelievably powerful about that, and there’s a real lesson in it, too. I’ve loved discovering Lee, all the sides of her. Playing her has also taught me something about myself, I’ve always strived to use my voice to support other women, but I feel inspired by Lee to do that so much more.”
For everyone involved in the film, it carried with it a clear message from Miller herself as Winslet says, “To tell this story about a woman who saw the world her own unique way, and who gave a voice to those who didn’t have the power to use theirs. A woman who knew how to be a woman herself by embodying her femininity and power…that’s Lee’s message and with it she is still showing us all the way.”
