It’s probably folly to attempt a biopic of Lee Miller—the Surrealist photographer, model, muse, and journalist who refused to be pinned down, whose many peregrinations signaled her reluctance to be hemmed in. Lee, however, refrains from presenting a sweeping portrait, instead homing in on an indelible chapter of Miller’s life: her war years.
Not that we don’t glimpse layers of her past life. When we first meet Miller (splendidly played by Kate Winslet) in Lee, she’s in France, at a spirited lunch picnic with pals from her Surrealist circle, among them fashion doyenne Solange D’Ayen (Marion Cotillard) and the Eluards (Noémie Merlant and Vincent Colombe). They introduce her to British painter Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), with whom she later settles down in London.
Noémie Merlant as Nusch Éluard, Marion Cotillard as Solange d’Ayen, Kate Winslet as Lee Miller, and Alexander Skarsgård as Roland Penrose in Lee (2024). Photo: by Kimberley French.
But their idyll is punctured by the onset of World War II, which calls to something deep within the flinty, restless artist. Circumventing a law that prevented British female civilians from entering active combat zones (she’s American), Miller in 1944 heads off to the front lines alongside Life photojournalist David Scherman (Andy Samberg), armed with her Rolleiflex camera and press credentials identifying her as a correspondent for British Vogue. Her documenting and witnessing of conflicts in Paris, Munich, and Hungary anchors much of Lee.
The decision to emphasize Miller’s war work, director Ellen Kuras told me, was deliberate, emerging from her discussions with Winslet. This focus “would enable us to see her, what drove her, and the emotional trajectory in her life,” she said over a video call.
Indeed, the movie’s unflinching war scenes unpack not just the violence and devastation that Miller observed, but what caught her eye as a photographer—not necessarily action and explosions, but the people and landscapes scarred by war. Lee follows her capturing the interior of a RAF female dormitory, a lone nurse outside a medical tent, and a girl who survived the bombing of her village, among other haunting scenes.
“What was different about Lee is what she chose to look at. Lee was interested in what was happening in a way outside of the frame of the combat. She brought us a view of the war that we would have never seen,” said Kuras. “War affects everyone. And Lee understood that.”
Lee Miller wearing special helmet borrowed from U.S Army photographer Don Sykes (Sergeant), Normandy, France, 1944, by unknown photographer. Photo: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
Helpfully, the production team had rare and full access to the Lee Miller Archives, spearheaded and overseen by Antony Penrose, Lee and Roland’s son. Penrose, when I reached him over Zoom, recalled how Winslet regularly visited the physical archives in East Sussex in the U.K. to deeply read and research.
“We have a lot of researchers come to the archive and usually it is a very linear process. But with Kate, it went off in all kinds of different tangents,” he said. “I realized that she was building her perception of Lee’s personality from the work, of course, but the answers that I gave to her questions were important. She was letting Lee come up out of her photographs and her writings.”
Lee Miller, Artillery spotters with telephones in Hotel Ambassadeurs directing fire on Grand Bey and St Malo old town, Hotel Ambassadeurs, St Malo, France, 1944. Photo: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
Often overlooked, noted both Kuras and Penrose, was the fact that Miller also wrote and filed dispatches from the front lines—an aspect highlighted in Lee. Her son remembered finding an un-bylined manuscript about the siege of San Marlowe in her files; assuming it was penned by “some hot-shot Life magazine reporter,” he was stunned to learn it was written by his mother. Kuras, too, was struck by Miller’s dispatch from the liberation of Paris, which profoundly questioned the meaning of freedom.
“She had a philosophical overview,” Kuras said of Miller’s writings. “They were very articulate and had an uncanny way of looking at the world.”
Andy Samberg as David E. Scherman and Kate Winslet as Lee Miller in Lee (2024). Photo: Kimberley French.
That view comes into focus in one of Miller’s most famous war images. In it, she’s pictured taking a soak in Hitler’s bathtub, her boots, soiled from trudging through the camps, muddying the Führer’s fluffy white rug. Lee recreates the making of the photo with fine measures of sensitivity and gravity. Kuras, coming from a cinematography background (she lensed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for one), clearly grasps how the camera could serve as a medium for meaning—in the same way Miller did too.
“Kate and I had talked extensively about Lee Miller being someone who would have set that scene up. She would have realized its significance,” Kuras said. “You see Kate as Lee processing that as she turns on the water [to fill the bath]. You see her coming to this idea that she’s going to set it up. She truly understood the meaning behind taking that photo.”
Andrea Riseborough as Audrey Withers and Kate Winslet as Lee Miller in Lee (2024). Photo: Kimberley French.
The effect of the war on Miller after she returns to London is also detailed here. There’s her pain of learning that British Vogue won’t publish her most gruesome images (Andrea Riseborough gives a steely performance as the magazine’s editor Audrey Withers); and hints of the post-traumatic stress disorder that would dog Miller for the rest of her life. Her psychological wounds, which manifested in alcoholism, were such that she never spoke of her war work to her son (played by Josh O’ Connor).
In fact, Lee is as much Miller’s story as it is about Penrose’s realization of what his mother did during the war—unfolding here in a framing device that while contrived, does deliver an emotional punch. After her death in 1977, Penrose unearthed her trove of war photos and artifacts, stowed away and left forgotten in an attic; the discovery, he said, entirely upended his understanding of his mother.
Lee Miller, Fire Masks, 21 Downshire Hill, London, England, 1941. Photo: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
“During the first 25 years of her life with me, she was deeply affected by alcohol abuse and depression, which was really a function of PTSD, which we knew nothing about. So, I just formed the opinion that she was a useless drunk and we had a very hostile relationship. We fought like crazy,” he recalled. “What a waste of time.”
Mother and son would reconcile later in her life: she did get around to showing him how to work a camera and got to meet her first granddaughter. Of Lee‘s imagined conversations between Miller and her son, Penrose said: “He’s asking all the questions I so wish I had the opportunity to ask in in my mother’s lifetime, but I didn’t even know how to frame the question.”
Josh O’Connor in Lee (2024). Photo: Kimberley French.
Penrose has spent decades since the 1980s conserving and promoting Miller’s work, penning The Lives of Lee Miller in 1985 and compiling Lee Miller’s War in 2005, while staging exhibitions of her work across the world. And it’s in her photography, particularly her images of war, that he’s come to better recognize her, he said, as an artist and a person.
“The war photographs are what I would call an applied passion. It’s a burning feeling in her that she wants to show the world what has happened and she’s applying that passion to creating those images which are so clear and forceful. It’s the culmination of everything she’s ever done as a fashion photographer or as a Surrealist,” he said. “Like many Surrealist things, the images have so many layers. They’re a provocation for you to decode.”
