In 2015, Kate Winslet bought a table at an auction.
This was a table with an unusual history — for years residing in the kitchen of Farley House, the East Sussex holiday home of photographer Lee Miller and surrealist painter and art historian Roland Penrose.
Miller was a woman with a fascinating CV: a former model who became a surrealist photographer, a war correspondent and a celebrity chef.
Miller (pictured in 1943) was one of the few female war correspondents who served in World War II. (U.S. Army Official Photograph, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Miller, an American expat, and her British husband would spend the weekends at Farley House with their famous friends, such as Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning and Henry Moore.
“Lee was a great cook, and she would prepare food, and they would sit around this table, and they would feast, and they would fight, and they would talk,” Winslet tells ABC RN Breakfast.
“And I bought this table, and when it arrived in my home, I sat down at it and I just thought, ‘My God, I wonder why no one’s made a film about her?'”
Nearly 10 years later, Winslet has done just that. She stars as Miller in Lee, a biopic charting her evolution from society darling to a hard-nosed war photographer who captured some of the most powerful images of World War II.
Who was Lee Miller?
“Lee was a truth-teller, she was a truth-seeker,” Winslet says.
“She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She saw herself always as one of the guys, and so it just made no sense to her that she wasn’t going to go into those male-dominated spaces and sit right at that table where she had firmly earned her place and had every right to be.”
Despite being a much sought-after model, Miller (pictured here in Vogue in 1931) preferred to work on the other side of the camera. (Getty Image: George Hoyningen-Huene/Condé Nast)
Born in 1907, Miller grew up in New York. Her modelling career was launched when she was 19 after a chance encounter with publisher Condé Nast — he reportedly saved her from being hit by a car on a Manhattan street — and her portrait graced the cover of Vogue in March 1927.
Two years later, she moved to Paris, where she persuaded surrealist photographer Man Ray to take her on as an apprentice. She soon became his lover, muse and creative collaborator in a partnership that was often turbulent.
She established her own photography studio in the US. After meeting Penrose at a party in 1937, she moved to the UK and worked as a fashion photographer.
She documented the London Blitz for Vogue when war broke out, but the British Army refused her application to become an official war photographer on the grounds that women were not permitted near the frontline.
So, Miller became an accredited war correspondent with the US Army instead, accompanying the Allied forces through France in 1944. She documented the Battle of Saint-Malo in Brittany and the liberation of occupied Paris.
In Germany in 1945, she photographed concentration camp victims at Dachau and Buchenwald, providing the world with evidence of the true horrors of the Holocaust.
She snuck into Hitler’s Munich apartment on April 30, 1945, the same day the dictator committed suicide in Berlin. And it was there that perhaps the most famous picture she appeared in was taken, by fellow war correspondent David E Scherman (surprisingly played by Andy Samberg in the film): Miller sitting in Hitler’s bath, with her dirty boots muddying the bath mat.
Miller appeared in the famous photo — recreated in the film and again by Annie Leibovitz and Winslet for Vogue in 2023 — as a symbol of conquest, her son, Antony Penrose, tells ABC RN’s The Screen Show.
“The way that she stamped the filth of Dachau into Hitler’s nice clean bath mat, she’s signalling that she’s not there as a guest in his house. She’s a victor, and she’s doing just what she likes.”
‘Kate has Lee’s best attributes’
When she started digging, Winslet learned Australian film producer Troy Lum (Boy Swallows Universe, The Water Diviner) had already bought the rights to Antony Penrose’s 1985 biography of his mother, The Lives of Lee Miller.
Winslet met with Lum and Penrose, who is also the co-founder of Lee Miller Archives, a trove of 60,000 photographs, notes, letters and ephemera kept at Farley House, where Miller and Penrose lived for 35 years.
The film opens in the 1930s in the “sun-drenched” south of France. (Supplied: Studio Canal)
The three teamed up and Winslet threw herself into the project, spending years researching Miller’s life.
“She is a very good lookalike, but it goes much deeper than that,” Penrose says.
“In terms of personality, they’re very similar. Kate has Lee’s best attributes, which is being highly intelligent, very compassionate, very funny, very daring in the way that she does things. It’s a good match at every level.”
The film focuses on the 10 years from the late 1930s to the end of World War II.
“[It was] the decade that defined Lee — and [the one] that she would be most proud of,” Kate Solomon, the film’s producer, tells The Screen Show.
Before the war, Miller was best known as a Vogue cover girl and the muse of Man Ray — “all the things that she didn’t really want to be remembered for”, Solomon says.
Penrose adds: “We got very fed up with people pigeonholing her as the beautiful muse who just slept with the right people and looked glamorous.
“There’s so much more to her and I’m really glad that Kate focused on that in this film.”
Restoring a legacy
For all her cool dispassion behind the camera, Miller’s time as a war photographer left her “seriously damaged”, Penrose says.
“We now understand post-traumatic stress disorder much better than we did then. There wasn’t even a name for it in the 1940s and 50s, and she and millions of others were suffering in the same way. The idea was you put up and you shut up and you carried on.”
Miller destroyed many of the photographs she took as a photojournalist in World War II. (Supplied: Studio Canal)
Miller experienced depression and alcohol abuse as she struggled to process the trauma of her past but she eventually found solace in the kitchen.
“The finest and most incredible thing that she ever did in her whole career was to fight her way up out of that and reinvent herself as a celebrity chef,” Penrose says.
Miller trained at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and shared her recipes in the back pages of Vogue.
In 2017, her granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane, published a collection of Miller’s favourite recipes in Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends & Recipes.
“This is the woman who had stood in Dachau and other places like it and witnessed millions of people starving to death without a speck of food between the lot of them. After the war, feeding people and giving pleasure from food was something that was quite a sacred element in her life. She established a vast kitchen garden at our home in Sussex and she just loved feeding her friends … who came to visit. It was really important to her.”
For Penrose, Lee is the culmination of his longstanding mission to restore his mother’s legacy as an artist.
“I’m just so glad that she is back here with a voice because, in her own lifetime, she was much overlooked, and this was the fate of a great many women creatives at that time,” he says.
“But now she’s back, and she’s telling us all about it through the medium of Kate, and it’s fantastic for me.”
Lee is in cinemas now.
