Lee Miller movie is currently in production in Croatia
In this episode of the Fine Art Photography Podcast, we’ll discuss a new movie about Lee Miller being made in Croatia, with Kate Winslet playing Lee. And we’ll discuss the fascinating life of Lee Miller herself.
Full Podcast Episode transcript
In this episode: They’re making a new movie about model and photographer Lee Miller
Intro
Welcome back to the fine art photography podcast. I’m really glad to have this topic because historically I have not talked enough about women photographers, even though some of my favorite photographers have been female.
So here’s my chance to talk about one of the greats.
There’s a new movie starring Kate Winslet that’s in production in Croatia now, and it’s about Lee Miller. I’m kinda surprised it took this long because Lee Miller was also a model, and she was gorgeous, and she hung around with some of the best-known photographers and artists of her day, and she was a quite talented photographer herself.
And she was a war correspondent — so you have all the ingredients of a Hollywood movie script — fame, glamor, sex, international travel, spies, and a tinge of danger.
First I’ll tell you what I know about the new movie, and then I’ll talk a little bit about the photographer.
As I said, the movie — which is being filmed in Croatia under the title of “Lee” — stars Kate Winslet in the lead role. It will also star Alexander Skarsgard, Andrea Riseborough, and Marion Cotillard.
The screenplay was based on Lee Miller’s biography written by her son Antony Penrose, himself a British photographer. He is also the director of the Lee Miller Archive.
The cinematographer is Pawel Edelman. The director Ellen Kuras is herself a cinematographer, so expect the film to be visually compelling.
The film is early in production so there’s no trailer yet, only a few publicity photographs of Winslet in a military-style combat uniform with a Rolleiflex around her neck. Of course there’s no projected release date yet, but a write-up in Vogue suggested probably in 2023.
The movie concentrates on Miller’s life in the years between 1938 and 1948, when she worked as a war photographer for Conde Nast and British Vogue. In fact, she became an accredited photographer with the U.S. Army and began covering the blitz in Britain, and then went on to France where she covered several battles and the liberation of Paris. She also covered the Nazi concentration camps.
IMDB’s write-up for the movie says quote: “The story of photographer Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller, a fashion model who became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine during World War II.”
Elizabeth Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907. Her father was an amateur photographer who enjoyed using her as a model as a child. He taught her some aspects of photography but also took unclothed photos of her. Sadly, while staying with family friends in Brooklyn, Lee was raped and contracted an STD at age 7 — if you can believe that. It’s hard for me to even say those words. Following that, she had a tumultuous childhood and suffered a lot of behavioral problems in school.
At age 18 she went to Paris where she studied lighting and costumes at a school of stagecraft. By age 19, she was back in the States, enrolled in an experimental drama program Vassar, and then at the Art Students League. It was around this time when something that sounds right out of a Cary Grant movie happened — Lee Miller almost stepped in front of an oncoming car but was stopped by none other than Conde Nast — a chance and fortuitous meeting that saved her life and got her started as a professional model. Vogue’s editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase said Miller had the look of the emerging idea of the quote “modern girl”.
For a couple of years, Miller was one of the hottest models in New York, shot by all the top name photographers of the day including Edward Steichen. But it was a Steichen photograph, used without her knowledge, for an advertisement for Kotex sanitary towels, that brought the end of her modeling career. Kotex products were relatively new on the market and the ads were considered scandalous and were often rejected by publications unless they were very vague. Miller was unwittingly the first woman to appear in an ad for them.
Miller was reportedly furious at the time, but later said she was happy to have broken a taboo.
Within a year, Miller returned to Paris uninvited with the intention of becoming an apprentice in the studio of Surrealist photographer and artist Man Ray. Man Ray refused her for a while, saying he did not accept students. But before long she was his model, muse, student, and his lover. The pair worked so closely as photographers that some of her work is probably credited to him, and she sometimes took on his photography assignments so he could work on personal projects.
It’s said that she helped rediscover the technique of solarization when a mouse scampered across her foot in the darkroom, causing her to turn on the light while the print was in the developer. Solarization became an important technique for both photographers and one of the hallmarks of the surrealist movement. While with Man Ray, Miller became friends with some of the most notable artists in Paris at the time, including Pablo Picasso.
In 1932 Miller left Man Ray and Paris behind and returned to New York, where she rented two apartments — one to live in and one to serve as her photo studio. She found work in advertising agencies, retailers, and cosmetics industries. She also had work exhibited in important gallery and museum shows alongside marquee names like Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Margaret Bourke-White.
After a few years in New York, Miller gave up her photo studio, married an Egyptian businessman named Aziz Eloui Bey, and moved with him to Cairo. While in Cairo, she continued her personal pursuit of photography and not only participated in some exhibitions, but created several works that were later exhibited.
By 1937, Miller grew tired of life in Cairo and went back to Paris, still married to Bey, where she met painter and curator Roland Penrose, who many years later would become her husband and the father of Antony, the author of her biography on which the upcoming movie is based.
The couple was in the UK when the war broke out. In spite of the pleas of her family and friends in the US to return to the safety of home, Miller stayed in England. She photographed the effects of the German bombing raids. One of her first pieces in British Vogue portrayed British nurses on a military base in Oxford.
Working in Europe alongside American photojournalist David E. Scherman, Miller created quite a stir by being photographed in Hitler’s bathtub at one of his secret apartments in Munich. Scherman took the photograph of her on the same day Hitler committed suicide. She also took photographs of him in the tub. Scherman was a Jew born in New York — imagine a Jew bathing in Hitler’s bathtub.
While it was controversial, Miller defended the photographs saying they were a provocation by a woman and Jew, meant to remove some of the mystique from the man.
As an article on artbook.com says, the photo sent a message that the Fuhrer is dead and we are here now.
Her son Antony was quoted in The Telegraph as saying, quote: “I think she was sticking two fingers up at Hitler. On the floor are her boots, covered with the filth of Dachau, which she has trodden all over Hitler’s bathroom floor. She is saying she is the victor.” End quote.
Miller said she was struck by the attitudes of Germans near the end of the war, who saw Hitler not as a madman or architect of genocide, but rather as a great man with good ideas who had been badly advised and manipulated by bad people.
Her years photographing the carnage and violence of the war left Miller with clinical depression and a serious case of what we now call PTSD. She struggled with alcohol. She was also restless and missed the action and heightened emotions of her life as a wartime photojournalist. She was quoted by the BBC as having written in a letter to her photography mentor Scherman saying “for some reason, I always want to be somewhere else”.
In 1947, she became pregnant by Penrose, so she divorced Bey and married Penrose. They moved to Farley Farm House in East Sussex, UK, where she lived the rest of her life. The Farley Farm attracted many of the big-name artists and writers the couple had known in Paris.
Miller continued contributing photographs to Vogue and other projects. She died in 1977 at age 70, a victim of cancer.
Wikipedia includes one intriguing line about Miller, with no explanation. It says that Miller was investigated as a potential Soviet spy by MI5 in the 1940s and 1950s.
An article published in the San Diego Tribune said that an unnamed colleague at British Vogue reported Miller because of her friendship with a known Communist, Wilfred McCartney, who had been jailed in Britain as a Soviet spy. A police report for 1956 called Miller and Penrose quote: “extreme left-wing idealists.” After almost 20 years of observation, MI5 concluded that Miller was an eccentric person with a taste for quote: “Queer foods and clothes,” end quote — but that she posed no real risk to the British nation. The report said her communism was more of a mental outlook than anything and that she was not a member of any subversive organization.
Adding additional color to the intrusive methods used by MI5 to monitor Lee Miller and others, The Guardian said quote: “the intelligence services opened private letters, eavesdropped on conversations, studied their reading habits and recorded developments in their love life.” — end quote.
Lee Miller didn’t really do a lot of self-promotion of her work during her lifetime. It’s largely thanks to the efforts of her son Antony, who oversees her archive, that her work is still known today.
In an article on the BBC, Antony Penrose describes finding in the attic at Farley Farm House a treasure trove of her negatives, contact sheets, manuscripts, mud-stained maps, military passes and contraband souvenirs — a record of her work and life in the war. These are the materials he has used to help promote her work into current times.
One source said that the middle-aged Miller had expressed a desire to be remembered for her own work, not simply as a model or muse for men. Maybe between the efforts of her son and the new movie, her desire will be achieved for a little while anyways
That’s all I’ve got for this episode.
As always, transcripts, links, and sources can be found in the show notes and on my blog at I Catch Shadows Dot Com.
Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you again real soon.
Sources and Links
Artbook.com. “Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub”
BBC. “Lee Miller: In Hitler’s Bathtub”
The Guardian. “Glamorous socialites were spied on by MI5”
IMDB. “Lee.”
Period. “Kotex Girl.”
San Diego Tribune. “British Spies Kept Tabs on Photographer Lee Miller”
The Telegraph. “Lee Miller: The Woman in Hitler’s Bathtub”
Vogue. “Here’s Your First Look at Kate Winslet as Vogue Model and War Correspondent Lee Miller”
Wikipedia. “Lee Miller”
Wow, this is exciting! I look forward to the movie, and thanks for doing the research on her. I love biographies of people like this.