For nine years now, Kate Winslet has been fighting to bring the story of Lee Miller to the screen – a near-decade that’s finally about to bear fruit. In a total switch-up from Mare Of Easttown and Avatar: The Way Of Water, Winslet will next be seen portraying Miller in Lee – which she’s also produced, venturing back to World War II to tell the story of the photographer who captured the likes of the Blitz, the concentration camp at Dachau, and the liberation of Paris for Vogue magazine. Miller’s legacy has long been waiting to be told; Winslet’s take was the one that was finally given the go-ahead by Miller’s only son.
For Winslet, the weight of telling this story – and showing the impact that Miller’s time in the war had on her life – was exactly why it was worth telling. “I wanted to try and redefine how people might discover her,” she tells Empire. “For perhaps another generation of young women, perhaps people who know her images or what she looked like but don’t know this defining decade of her life, that put her through hell. What she lived through and what she achieved is something. It should be celebrated. It’s her legacy.”
Part of that legacy was the distinct lens through which Miller, one of only four female photojournalists accredited by the USA, observed the war – quite literally capturing a different side to the conflict. “Lee really did see the world through female eyes,” Winslet explains. “She was also a woman rebelling against the male gaze.” That applied both to herself, and her work. “She was leaving it behind, shedding it, like a fucking skin, almost scrubbing it off herself — and immersing herself in violence and dirt in order to eradicate it from her own system, let alone the memory that everyone else had of her.” Get ready to see Winslet as you’ve never seen her before – but, as dedicated on-screen as ever.
Read Empire’s full Lee feature – speaking to Kate Winslet and director Ellen Kuras about bringing Lee Miller’s astonishing life to the screen – in the Joker: Folie À Deux issue, on sale Thursday 1 August. Pre-order a copy online here. Lee comes to UK cinemas from 13 September, and streams on Sky Cinema later this year.