Kate Winslet plays Hampstead war photographer Lee Miller

The Oscar-winning actor appears in LEE opposite Alexander Skarsgård as her husband, the English Surrealist painter and biographer Roland Penrose.

Born in 1907 she had been a top New York model in the 1920s before moving to Paris where she became the lover, model and assistant of surrealist photographer Man Ray.

Kate Winslet on the set of Lee with director Ellen Kuras and co-star Andy Samberg (Image: Sky Original)

After meeting Penrose in Cairo, she moved into his home in Downshire Hill Hampstead at the outbreak of World War II - their house becoming a haven for avant-garde artists including Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Andre Breton.

It was from the house that American-born Miller started working at British Vogue, initially photographing celebrity and fashion stories, as rationing bit deep, she took her camera out of the studio to capture war on the home front, including the opening of her local air raid shelter.

As America entered the war, she became one of only four women photojournalists accredited as US war correspondents, turning her lens on the female pilots, ATS wardens and nurses on the frontline.
Crossing into Europe after D Day, she joined American servicemen fighting their way across Europe and with her Rolleiflex camera captured horrific photographs of the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald.

An image, staged by Lee and taken by her lover LIFE Magazine journalist David Scherman in Hitler's bath in Munich is now iconic.

Miller returned from war, shattered and traumatised. She and Penrose moved to Sussex in 1947 when their son Anthony was born - she coped with her PTSD by turning to drink and boxing up her photography archive in the attic where her son discovered it after her death.

Lee, a Sky Original film which premieres in the UK on 13th September hones in on the intense decade of Miller's life just before, during and after the war, and the enormous personal price she paid for capturing some of the most important images of WWII.

Kate Winslet also co-produced Lee which co-stars Marion Cotillard (Image: Sky Original)

It was the happenstance of buying a table once owned by Roland Penrose's sister-in-law Annie, that put Winslet onto Miller's story.

That put her in touch with Anthony Penrose, whose mission to revive interest in his mother's extraordinary life and work has led to numerous exhibitions but so far, no films.

Winslet who also co-produces, insisted the movie was directed by a woman (Ellen Kuras) and taking Penrose's book The Lives of Lee Miller as the entry point, started thinking about a script.

"We kept asking ourselves, how do we stop this being a biopic?" says Winslet.

"It would have been impossible to tell the cradle-to-grave story of Lee Miller because she lived so many lives.”

Focusing on a decade of Miller’s life was a way “to get rid of all the preconceived ideas about Lee Miller as the model and the subject of many male artists’ gaze," she added.

In the film, a journalist plays by Josh O'Connor (The Crown) interviews Lee in the later stages of her life about her photographs as it flashes back to scenes shot in Budapest, Croatia and 

Winslet says of Miller: “She was a life force to be reckoned with, so much more than an object of attention from famous men with whom she is associated.

"This woman was a photographer, writer, and reporter. She did everything with love, lust, and courage. She is an inspiration for what you can achieve, what you can bear, and what you can do if you dare to take life firmly by the hands and live it at full throttle.

“Lee Miller was a truth-seeker and a truth-teller, at an enormous emotional and personal cost to herself, that was the thing that drove her and that was the reason she wanted to tell the truth of the atrocities of the Nazi regime.

"I'm so taken by her, how she lived, how she was free with her body, with her affection, with her opinions about things, with telling the truth, speaking the truth and teaching other people how to do that... To be playing someone who I truly admire, adore, look up to, and aspire to be even a little bit like, it’s the most enormous privilege."

With access to Lee's original photographs and contact sheets, Winslet was struck by how Miller confronted the horrors of war, whether taking photos of Nazi families who had committed suicide, or jumping onto a train full of corpses to capture the faces of the guards responsible for their deaths.

It’s brave stuff ” she explains, “and that’s where her work really stood out. Miller refused to allow things to be covered up, partly because she herself was covering up a trauma of her own, but also because she truly believed that she had to inform as many people as she possibly could about the atrocities of the Nazi regime. And she did.”

Anthony Penrose says including these images in the film was “a wonderful celebration of her work” and allows the audience to discover more about Miller.

"The key thing that defines her photography is compassion, and that comes from somebody who knew what suffering really felt like.

"She knew what it was like to be marginalised, to be badly treated. She knew what it was like to be in danger and that comes through in her photography.”