Kate Winslet’s eight-year battle to bring the life of Lee Miller to the big screen

“I was terribly, terribly pretty. I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside…” remembered Lee Miller of her Jazz Age years in Paris and New York. A successful model and aspiring photographer, by the age of 20 Miller had lived more biopic plots than an entire awards season of female-centred films.

Abused by a babysitter as a seven-year-old, bereaved of a boyfriend in a freak boating accident as a teenager and, pulled from the path of oncoming traffic, only Miller, you think, could be rescued by Condé Nast himself, who soon had her face on the cover of Vogue.

With these formative experiences, even before her second act as a great war correspondent (banned from accompanying the D-Day invasions, she was there six weeks in, sending home some of the toughest photojournalism of the conflict), it’s a surprise that Miller hasn’t been the subject of a film until now.

And whilst she is often talked about in the same breath as Man Ray, one of her great loves, it’s her singular, startlingly modern spirit that Kate Winslet set out to put on film. Antony Penrose, on whose 1985 biography of his extraordinary mother, “The Lives of Lee Miller”, the film is based, could see Winslet playing her as long ago as “Titanic” (1997), when her gusto for the icy stunts impressed him as much as the uncanny physical resemblance.

However, even with Winslet’s stellar involvement, with the pandemic and film-industry strikes, Lee has been eight years in the making. In the Miller family, stubbornness was known as “applied determination” and, at this juncture, perhaps it’s the quality the two women most share: whilst Lee was first seen at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, Winslet and her team held out for over a year before obtaining a proper theatrical release.

So here’s to those tenacious women, including director Ellen Kuras (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and producers such as Kate Solomon and Finola Dwyer, whose combined determination means we can mark our diaries to see this landmark film in a cinema, where Miller, her bravery and Winslet’s performance truly belong.

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Thanks to the ever-more-perilous nature of independent film financing, at one point Kate Winslet (who is also a producer on the film) paid all the production crew’s salaries herself for two weeks in order to keep on track a project for which “passion” seems too weak a word.