Kate Winslet's eight-year battle to bring the life of Lee Miller to the big screen

Lee, based on the 1985 biography The Lives of Lee Miller, has been a long time in the making

Kate Winslet in Lee
Kate Winslet in Lee
(Image credit: Kimberley French / Sky UK Ltd)

"I was terribly, terribly pretty. I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside…" remembered Lee Miller of her Jazz Age years in Paris and New York. A successful model and aspiring photographer, by the age of 20 Miller had lived more biopic plots than an entire awards season of female-centred films.

Raped by a babysitter as a seven-year-old, bereaved of a boyfriend in a freak boating accident as a teenager and, pulled from the path of oncoming traffic, only Miller, you think, could be rescued by Condé Nast himself, who soon had her face on the cover of Vogue.

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And whilst she is often talked about in the same breath as Man Ray, one of her great loves, it's her singular, startlingly modern spirit that Kate Winslet set out to put on film. Antony Penrose, on whose 1985 biography of his extraordinary mother, "The Lives of Lee Miller", the film is based, could see Winslet playing her as long ago as "Titanic" (1997), when her gusto for the icy stunts impressed him as much as the uncanny physical resemblance.

However, even with Winslet's stellar involvement, with the pandemic and film-industry strikes, Lee has been eight years in the making. In the Miller family, stubbornness was known as "applied determination" and, at this juncture, perhaps it's the quality the two women most share: whilst Lee was first seen at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, Winslet and her team held out for over a year before obtaining a proper theatrical release.

So here's to those tenacious women, including director Ellen Kuras ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") and producers such as Kate Solomon and Finola Dwyer, whose combined determination means we can mark our diaries to see this landmark film in a cinema, where Miller, her bravery and Winslet's performance truly belong.

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Thanks to the ever-more-perilous nature of independent film financing, at one point Kate Winslet (who is also a producer on the film) paid all the production crew's salaries herself for two weeks in order to keep on track a project for which "passion" seems too weak a word.

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Olivia Cole is a cultural commentator whose work on film, art and literature has been published in GQ, Vanity Fair, The Spectator and The Times.