‘Lee’: Kate Winslet Connected To Lee Miller Because “We Live In A Time Where It’s Still So Challenging For Women To Just Be Themselves”

In making the film Lee, about World War II correspondent Lee Miller, Kate Winslet chose to champion a woman who simply refused to become what society dictated. Against all odds, shucking off her reputation as a fashion model, at a time when women were not allowed to work with the British Army, Miller determinedly made her way into a career as a war correspondent, venturing into dangerous territory alongside troops, capturing Nazi atrocities. However, the extent of her work was largely undiscovered until, upon her death, her son Antony Penrose stumbled on her archives in the family attic. For Winslet, who would produce and star as Miller, this was a story of an unsung hero; a woman who was so much more than the oft-used description ‘muse’ to the artist Man Ray. So strongly did Winslet feel that at times during production, she dug into her own pockets to keep it going.

Winslet re-teamed with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind cinematographer Ellen Kuras to direct, and worked tirelessly with Liz Hannah, Marion Hume and John Collee to develop a script based on Penrose’s biography The Lives of Lee Miller. Andrea Riseborough, Marion Cotillard, Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgård and Josh O’Connor also star. The resulting film was eight years in the making, and, as Penrose told Deadline following Lee’s TIFF premiere in 2023: “Kate Winslet had such a profound understanding of Lee and a passion for Lee and all the things that she stands for.”

Here, in the wake of her Golden Globe nomination for the role, Winslet explains the personal and universal pull of Lee’s story and the impact of embodying a pioneering truth-teller.

DEADLINE: I first saw Lee at TIFF in 2023. I know the strike delayed the release, so I’m really pleased to see its success now.

KATE WINSLET: So am I, honestly. It’s been a chapter of my life. It’s been so unique and so different to any other experience of playing a character that I’ve ever had, really, because it wasn’t just about playing the role. It was about getting the film made and producing every inch of it, in a way that I feel like I still am, and it’s felt like a duty and a mission and something that I’m phenomenally proud of.

And to get the Golden Globe nomination has, honestly, it has just filled me with so much joy and gratitude, really, truly, because it does mean that I get to keep talking about it, and that hopefully, because of that, more people will see it. Because with a film like this, all you want is for people to know about it and to see it. I wanted to make it, to tell Lee’s story, to have people maybe discover her for the first time this way, away from the male gaze, lifting her out of that terrible description of her having been the muse, the ex-model, the former cover girl—these sort of terrible infantilizing words—and it’s just great to still be able to talk about her, honestly.

DEADLINE: When I was a teenager, my art teacher at school took me to an exhibit of Lee’s photos and it made a huge impression on me. Here was a woman doing things everybody told her she couldn’t do.

WINSLET: Oh, wow.

DEADLINE: Antony Penrose told me he felt you had such a deep understanding of his mother. Why do you think that was so?

WINSLET: I connected to her because this is somebody who had to endure scrutiny. She had been the subject of so much criticism actually, and this was somebody who had to hang onto herself to keep going, to be true to who she was, for the sake of what she believed in, but also on the part of so many other women. And I think we do live in a time where it seems to still be so challenging for women to just be themselves.

I think that since #MeToo, a lot has changed because I think that we’re hearing women’s stories with different ears, truly listening to each other. And also, I think women are looking out for one another in a way that perhaps we didn’t before, and I think it feels so timely, Lee’s story. It feels so timely. The way in which we also understand the work of war correspondents, what they do, especially the women, having to keep going with that resilience, that power. Lee was already someone who, 80 years ago, was redefining femininity to mean power and compassion and courage. And it’s so much to do with how we live our lives now as women, how we lead with integrity where we can and look out for one another, and her story, it just feels so palpable, so relevant. She was brave. She was bold. She was determined, and I feel that way myself a lot, and I feel a sense of duty to be that person for others who perhaps don’t get an opportunity to be a voice for others, to tell other people’s stories.

And I just knew that if I didn’t make this film, Lee’s real story about who she became during the war, I just knew her story may never be told, and I wanted to do it for Antony as well, more than anything else. He had waited a much longer time than I had done to make this film. It’s been almost 40 years for him, I think, since he was handed a screenplay of her life, and I just feel so lucky that it was this one that he really believed should be made.

DEADLINE: Lee didn’t accept the rules. Is there some way that you personally have had to do that, that has really impacted your life?

WINSLET: [Laughs] I don’t know why I’m laughing. I guess I’m laughing because I feel like I’m constantly breaking rules.

DEADLINE: Right. It’s probably an everyday thing.

WINSLET: Yes. I mean, it’s about breaking through societal norms. It’s about looking a certain way on screen that feels truthful and not airbrushed out or watered down or softened in any way just for the sake of making film, because perhaps that’s what people might expect. Life isn’t necessarily a pretty picture. For most people, it isn’t, and for me, it certainly wasn’t. And I believe in that, in telling stories, and I certainly believed in that, in making the film, and making this film about Lee.

I mean, this is somebody who left her ego at the door when she gave up being a model in her early twenties. She hated being a model anyway. She was a model for a couple of years and couldn’t wait to stop, and what she did in reinventing herself as a photographer, becoming a war correspondent, not just a photographer, but someone who had to write about what she saw. She’d never written before. She was terrified of that. And [Vogue editor] Audrey Withers played a huge part in giving her the confidence to go out there and do that. Audrey believed in other women. She also had wanted to be a writer herself. So, she knew what it took in order to support, as an editor, Lee’s work in encouraging her, championing her to keep going. The letters between Lee and Audrey were full of Audrey saying, “Keep going, dear girl. We’re all rooting for you back home. You can do this.” I mean, it’s wonderful to read those letters, and it was very important that we built that feminine support, that really specific female support into our film, and having access to the letters between Lee and Audrey was a very, very big and important part of that, in discovering that.

DEADLINE: Andrea Riseborough is just phenomenal as Audrey.

WINSLET: I know. She’s so wonderful and she’s so supportive, Andrea. I mean, she was the first actor to say yes to being in this film, and it was a long time ago. Once Andrea says she’s going to do something, she absolutely does it. She’s still supporting me now. We’ve become incredibly close friends. I’ve worked together with her again since [on limited series The Regime], I’m working with her again next year. She’s just such a magnificent force, and she’s an extraordinary person, and she’s one of the greatest actresses in the world.

DEADLINE: When you were trying to get this made, what was it like trying to get it financed? Because here’s a film that’s about a woman who doesn’t have this kind of Hollywood likeability fulfilling typical tropes of female characters.

WINSLET: It was phenomenally challenging, it really was. Aside from everything else, it’s a very hard time to try and make independent films. Financiers want guarantees on a return. They want input. They sometimes want things changed. And I was never prepared to make changes to suit money people. That just was not something I was ever going to do. And so finding the right people who supported that was really, really hard.

I did have a male investor say to me, “Why should I like this woman?” And I just thought, well, why are you taking the meeting then? Because I like her. I love her. I’m not about to explain to you why you should like her. Actually, it’s not about liking someone. That was the thing. It’s about respecting who they are, who they were, what they did. I wasn’t going to go around educating people on what they did or they didn’t see, because if they didn’t see it, then they weren’t going to be the right person for the job. I’m not going to take their cash flow if they weren’t fully behind what I was trying to do. So, it was really hard. There was a lot of pushback. It was no sort of one-stop-shop. We didn’t have a big studio we could call as a sort of emergency hotline who would come in and rescue us. If there were ever challenges, we would have to overcome them ourselves, and that’s exactly what we did. And it was hard. Sometimes the money wouldn’t be in the account when it was supposed to be in the account, and so we would just put our hands in our pockets ourselves and just keep going. But when people have to get paid, when vendors have to get paid, then I mean, that’s a line you don’t cross with me. People have to get paid. It’s just that’s it, that’s the bottom line. So, it was really challenging.

DEADLINE: I’m really interested in how you built this picture of Lee, her physicality. She’s very comfortable in her own physical being. She’s open, she’s warm, and she takes up space in a room with charisma and power.

WINSLET: It was a very lengthy process. I was very lucky that I was given full access and trust with the archive. So, not only did that mean being given access to her 60,000 negatives and prints of everything she’d done during the war and her camera kits, et cetera, but her clothes and her personal photographs, personal letters, personal diaries, but really coming to understand her childhood, number one, not least what had happened to her, the terrible horrific thing that had happened to her when she was seven years old [she was sexually assaulted by a family friend], but also knowing that yes, you are right, she was comfortable with her physical self, but that was really hard won. This was somebody who refused to be defined by what had happened to her as a child. And yes, she was warm. She could have been full of malice and rage. She could have been utterly resentful of all men. But she somehow refused to let what had happened to her dictate how she was going to live her life as an adult woman. And she went through a lot. Her diaries, which she only kept as a teenager actually, and they were more accounts of her physical and mental state, and I can tell you that she was in a state of permanent mental health crisis as a teenager.

DEADLINE: So, even before she developed PTSD due to the war, she battled mental health issues because of the assault.

WINSLET: Yes, she absolutely did, because she was still living with the scars of what had happened to her because, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but Lee contracted gonorrhea. It’s horrific, and she had to be subjected to very, very painful internal treatments every two weeks, which were administered by her mother who was a nurse. And so, her connection to her physical and mental self was phenomenally disjointed and scarred, and she had to live with that, live through that. She never thought she would have children, had been told she probably wouldn’t be able to have children. And so, getting pregnant with Antony was an enormous shock, just because she simply never thought that she could.

And so, that’s really how I did it. I dug right into everything. I had to know everything about her whole life in order to play the person that audiences would meet, because I didn’t want her to be vengeful and angry, because adult Lee had to do so much to leave her own anger behind in order to survive, in order to live, and in order to live the life of her choosing, on her terms. And that’s the story I wanted to tell—a woman who lived life on her terms, whatever the cost. And she did pay that personal price, that huge personal price with her PTSD, which was a part of who she became for the rest of her life, even though it came and went in varying degrees, and she was still able to reinvent herself and became a cordon bleu chef later in life. She just lived so many lives that every single chapter, for her, was seismic and hard-won.

DEADLINE: What do you feel her impact has been on you personally?

WINSLET: I just feel like there will always be a bit of her that has stayed behind, and often the character can be difficult to shake. Some are harder than others, and more often than not, I’m happy to leave them behind. But I think there’s parts of Lee that I would never really be able to truly leave behind because she’s inspired me so much. That sense of not caring what people think, never self-censoring, always speaking the truth, always speaking up for others. I feel like I’ve tried hard in my life, before making this film, to always do that and to be that person, but I feel that I have hopefully more become truly that person, largely because of having had the experience of playing her. And she did approach life with integrity. She did see the truth in people. She was able to take joy and pleasure in things that made her happy and really show affection and warmth for others, compassion for others. Those parts of her, I hope I’ll be able to hang on to.