Lee Miller: Everything you need to know before watching Kate Winslet's new film, Lee
‘The word muse gets thrown around. It irritates me to my core,’ writes Kate Winslet in the foreword to Lee Miller: Photographs, a recent collection of 100 images of the model-turned-photographer-turned-war-correspondent’s life and work. ‘To me, she was a life force to be reckoned with, so much more than an object of attention from the famous men with whom she is associated.’
Miller’s is a mettle that Winslet knows well, since it’s taken her eight years to fully realise Lee, the biopic of Miller’s life that she both stars in and produced. In bringing her story to the screen, Winslet has described ‘the most phenomenal fight’ – not least to finance the film (with Winslet at one point personally covering two weeks’ wages for the production crew until investment came together), as well as an active search for a (female) director who wouldn’t be preoccupied with stories of Miller’s many celebrity friends and lovers.
Based on the 1985 memoir The Lives Of Lee Miller, written by Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, in the years following her death, Lee chooses to focus on Miller’s time working for Vogue as a photojournalist during World War II – a time when women were rarely given accreditation to enter combat zones, and fashion magazines certainly weren’t known for covering them.
‘I have eaten the butter, so now I will face the guns,’ Miller wrote home to her family in America as she witnessed the first day of the Blitz on one of her famous detours to London. The film’s opening sequence depicts Miller, camera in hand, as she accompanies the Allied advance across Europe. ‘You find this middle-aged woman who’s just thrown herself in the middle of this battlefield – that is what Lee Miller did,’ explains director Ellen Kuras.
Originally a fashion model, Miller’s career began on the streets of New York in 1927, when a chance encounter with Condé Nast, the owner of Vogue, saw him yanking her from the path of an oncoming car. The then 19-year-old Miller fainted in his arms and a few weeks later an illustration of her elegant beauty appeared on the cover of the American edition of the magazine, capturing the essence of Jazz Age New York.
Miller went on to shoot for major fashion houses and commercial brands as one of the first supermodels, until Kotex used one of her images for a sanitary towels advert without her permission – the mere association rendering her unsavoury and therefore ‘cancelled’ overnight. Undeterred, Miller saw this as the start of a new career in Paris and went in search of the surrealist photographer Man Ray, becoming his apprentice. While her knowledge of Vogue’s style requirements allowed him to tailor his work to the American market, his training gave her the platform for her own photography, and Lee Miller Studios, Inc. was born.
Yet it was using her camera as her weapon of choice in the face of conflict that produced some of her most powerful images. Kate Winslet notes that few of Miller’s wartime portraits are ‘as you might expect’. ‘One expects to see pictures of battle,’ agrees Kuras. ‘[But] so many of Miller’s photos were about the people. She was very much about showing what we never saw.’
Despite her vow that she would ‘rather take a photograph than be one’, perhaps Miller’s most famous image came when she and the photographer David E Scherman snuck into Hitler’s flat in Munich and she posed for a nude portrait in his bathtub. Though she did not yet know that he was dead, her combat boots are at the centre of shot, their dirt wiped on to what Winslet calls ‘the dictator’s silly little bathmat’.
‘We see the epitome of who she truly was. Bold, decisive and honest,’ writes Winslet, reflecting from her own film set, where she admits that even putting pen to paper for the book’s introduction makes her feel ‘overwhelmed’.
‘There are so many stories of girls to whom things happened,’ she says. ‘Lee Miller was a woman who made things happen. I don’t mind admitting I adore her.’
Lee is in cinemas from 13 September. Lee Miller: Photographs (Thames & Hudson) is out now
This article originally appeared in Red magazine
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