For Kate Winslet, portraying fashion model and muse-turned- photojournalist Lee Miller is personal
The Academy Award-winning actor talks to Troy Bramston about taking on her most challenging and important screen role, in Lee.
Kate Winslet has long been fascinated by Lee Miller – fashion model, muse, photographer and WWII photojournalist. Nine years ago, when friends at an auction house alerted her to a kitchen table that was once owned by Miller’s family, she had to have it. Winslet was the final bidder before the hammer fell.
When the table was delivered, she ran her hands over the wooden surface and imagined who had tucked their knees underneath, what conversations had been had around it, the food and drink it had carried, and what stories it might tell. Winslet realised there was a story here that had not yet been fully told.
“When you look at a woman like Lee Miller who had achieved so much in her life and did something of such phenomenal historical importance, it was at a time when women were not being allowed to do this,” Winslet, 49, tells Review in an interview prior to her visit to Australia next week.
“Telling those stories to a younger generation of women and opening up the conversation around what it means to reveal all the truth, what it means to stand up for yourself and what we believe in, and to live with a degree of integrity despite what was stacked against her.
“I believe in pushing those stories into the world because those things hopefully become inspiring. Lee’s story and who she was is overwhelmingly inspirational to me. And so, for that reason, there was no way I was going to take my foot off the gas.”
The result is the extraordinary film, Lee, which focuses on Miller’s life at a turning point. After studying theatre production, acting, drawing and painting, she became a fashion model in New York and Paris in the 1920s, where she met Man Ray and became his model and muse. Miller later became an artist in her own right and a commercial photographer with her work exhibited and published.
Living in London with artist Roland Penrose, she was changed by the war and wanted to report it. Miller secured a position with British Vogue, photographing Londoners during the Blitz. Seeking something more, she became a US Army correspondent and snapped nurses and patients, women in the auxiliary services, filing words and pictures for American Vogue. Miller went to Europe after D-Day where she witnessed the fighting at Saint-Malo in France.
Speaking to Review in a car en route to London, Winslet is charming and engaging, apologetic about the time difference and unstable Zoom link. “You’re getting the full, real, glamorous me right now,” she jokes. She eschews celebrity culture, does not read movie reviews, swears like a trooper, and is forthright and down to earth.
Lee is a passion project that took almost a decade to make and Winslet is thoughtful and energetic in explaining why she was determined to see it on screen.
“It took a long time to get the script really right because Lee Miller lived such a vast, varied and huge life and kept reinventing herself,” Winslet explains. “We developed a version of the script that started me at a much younger age and took me to a much older age.
“That process was incredibly valuable as it so often is with working out the beginning, middle and end of any story because we were forced to really immerse ourselves in exactly who she was. The most interesting decade of her life, her most defining, was the decade that covers her time just before, during and immediately post-WWII.”
Winslet is one of the finest actors of her generation with seven Academy Award nominations, winning Best Actress for The Reader (2008), along with five Golden Globe Awards, five BAFTA Awards, and two Emmy Awards, one most recently for the acclaimed HBO series Mare of Easttown (2001).
Known for portraying complex female characters in period dramas and independent films alongside a few blockbusters, Winslet turned in commanding performances in Heavenly Creatures (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Titanic (1997), Quills (2000), Iris (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Revolutionary Road (2008), Contagion (2011), Steve Jobs (2015), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), and the HBO series Mildred Pierce (2011).
“I just stick with what I know and my instincts,” Winslet says of how she decides which roles to take. “If I read something that scares the shit out of me, and I can’t get it out of my head, usually I’ll pull back the curtain a little more and just see what else might be lurking behind it. And so, honestly, I tend to be really motivated by the fear factor.
“I am very driven by things that have perhaps something hidden in them by way of either a social message or that contributes to a global conversation. I will certainly find myself leaning into stories that resonate with me in that way because I do think that we live in a world where it is equally as important to be entertaining audiences as much as it is to be opening up conversations.”
No role is more iconic than that of Rose in Titanic. Aged just 22 when it was released, it catapulted her to stardom but led to unwarranted tabloid media intrusion into her life. Ever resilient, Winslet buzzes with memories of a difficult shoot that produced a landmark cinematic achievement, and the friendships forged with director James Cameron and actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
“I love the fact that it still comes up and people still talk about it,” she says. “Occasionally, they release it again and then another generation of people discover it for the first time. I have nothing other than gratitude for the experience that I had and that amazing opportunity because it really was the beginning of me having a lot more freedom of choice, and that’s not to be taken lightly.”
Review saw Lee in June as part of the Sydney Film Festival. Winslet is formidable in the title role, embodying Miller’s strength and courage alongside her compassion, discernment and vulnerability as she moves on from pre-war picnics with surrealist artists to establishing a career as a photojournalist. Miller demonstrated what a woman could do in a man’s world, redefining femininity, fought to ensure her images were seen and struggled with post-traumatic stress.
The film is directed by Ellen Kuras, who Winslet met as cinematographer on the set of Heavenly Creatures 20 years ago. It has an outstanding supporting cast that includes Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgard, Marion Cotillard, Josh O’Connor, Andrea Riseborough and Noemie Merlant.
Spending time with Antony Penrose, son of Lee and Roland, gave Winslet insight into Miller. Penrose, 77, found thousands of his mother’s photographs in her attic after her death in 1977. The film is based on his biography, The Lives of Lee Miller (1985), which draws on photos, letters and journals.
“He’s waited 40 years for a film version about his mother to be made,” Winslet says. “He started to really share, I think, the truth of how he really felt being raised by quite a difficult woman who had mental health issues and a difficult relationship with alcohol. And so, I was therefore given real access, in a very respectful and loving way, to absolutely everything that lied within the cracks of her.”
What makes the film especially compelling is the rendering of several of Millers’ iconic photos. We see how they were conceived and what happened after, through both her lens and eyes. Miller photographed Paris after its liberation and battles between the Allied and German forces, and was one of first journalists to document the horrors of the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.
“It was incredibly important to us how Lee came to take those images, how she came to be in those spaces, what she went through to get there, and what she felt in those situations because Lee was very, very brave, but she certainly wasn’t fearless,” Winslet says.
“Sometimes her heart would race and she could feel her veins pumping in her neck, and she would somehow just dig deep and keep going. Her ability and determination to bear witness was the thing, really, that drove us.”
Some of those photos of distraught and displaced families, victims of Nazi atrocities piled high, dead soldiers, skeletal survivors, starving children, were deemed too confronting to be published in British Vogue by editor Audrey Withers (Riseborough). Some of Miller’s words and pictures were censored, including the use of napalm at Saint Malo. American Vogue published Miller’s photos of the Nazi death camps beneath the headline: “Believe It”.
One of the most remarkable photos connected to Miller was not taken by her but of her. When Miller and David Scherman (Samberg) from LIFE magazine went to Adolf Hitler’s Munich apartment after he had fled to his bunker in Berlin, she took a bath in his tub with her boots caked in mud from Dachau rubbed into the mat. Scherman took the photo. That same day, Hitler committed suicide.
The attention to detail, from the ghastly green tiled floor and yellow lemon towels, and the portrait of Hitler positioned on the edge of the bathtub, is meticulous. During the filming, Winslet reveals that when she removed the photograph of Hitler from the frame, the glass broke.
“All I could do was kind of laugh,” she recalls. “Like, of course, it would f**king break. Like, of course, something else is going to be thrown at us because everything was being thrown at me across a number of years. And I was like, yeah, sure. Lee’s going to pull the levers down hard enough that when we’re actually shooting, the glass smashed in my hands. And I just laughed about it, and it stayed in the film.”
This film is personal to Winslet. It was a long and challenging journey to see it made. She is more invested in it than any other project. Indeed, Winslet says it has been the greatest privilege of her career in film, television and stage to portray the intrepid Miller.
“I can go quite far into something and get perhaps a little bumped and bruised emotionally myself,” Winslet says. “That was no exception on Lee. I had to learn to almost live with her, probably more than any of the other roles I’ve played, just because the process went on for such a long time.”
But she was determined to see Miller’s story on screen. “I became more and more like her in spirit,” Winslet adds. “I was not going to give up. I was not going to take no for an answer. I was just determined to keep going.”
Lee opens in cinemas on October 24.
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