I have long been intrigued by the life and work of the remarkable American model, muse, photographer and ‘friend of the surrealists’ Lee Miller. I was delighted when I heard that Kate Winslet was making a movie about Miller’s life and in particular her pioneering work as a female war photographer. That film Lee, years in the making, was finally released in UK cinemas this weekend. These are my thoughts on the film and Lee Miller’s background and wider history – Jeremy Miles
Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller was a complicated and troubled woman who lived an extraordinary life, careering with chaos and style through some of the best and worst that the 20th century could throw at her.
Born in upstate New York in 1907, Lee’s comfortable childhood was traumatised when she was raped by a family acquaintance. She was just seven years old.
This terrible ‘shameful’ secret – her mother warned her that she should never speak of it – seemed to instil a desperate need to escape.
Disruptive behaviour saw her expelled from school and as soon as she could this sharply intelligent, determined and beautiful young woman was off to establish a glamorous international life as a photographic model. Not an easy thing to achieve but from an early age Lee seemed to possess an intuitive ability to charm and talk her way past apparently insurmountable barriers. She soon found herself in Paris posing for the leading fashion magazines of the day. She became a favourite of the pioneering surrealist photographer and artist Man Ray and was soon not just his model but his muse, his lover, his assistant and collaborator.
Her own work as a photographer took her across Europe and North Africa and the Middle East shooting everything from fashion to travelogue and honing her already finely attuned surrealist eye.
But where to next? The outbreak of war in 1939 would change everything. Living in London with her soon to be new husband, the art historian Roland Penrose, Lee felt helpless to contribute to the war effort but was determined to try and photograph the action in occupied France.
Somehow she managed to persuade Vogue magazine to commission her as a war photographer. With the help of photographic colleague and friend David Scherman who worked for Life magazine, she also secured American military accreditation and putting herself at enormous risk became a war correspondent and that rarest of creatures, a woman photographer working on the front line, almost unheard of in the 1940s.
She photographed under fire and bombardment amid the blood and gore of the French battlefields, taking unflinching shots of amputations and makeshift surgery in field hospitals, the piles of rotting bodies in the brutal disease-ridden hell hole that was the newly liberated death camp at Dachau.
She returned from war exhausted and horrified by the things she had seen but with a huge set of historic and truly iconic photographs. They included the famous portrait of Lee herself sitting defiantly in Hitler’s bath taken by David Scherman after the pair had talked their way into the Fuhrer’s Munich apartment on the day of his suicide.
Her stunning war images were eventually published with Lee’s own accompanying text in a spread in American Vogue. It shocked, informed and finally framed Miller in the public eye as a fearless photographer and campaigner who refused to be defined or indeed confined by her gender.
Sadly the punishing ordeals she had put herself through and the demons that raced through her troubled mind proved all too much.
Lee returned to the UK and finally settled with Penrose at Farley’s farmhouse in an idyllic corner of East Sussex. They often played host to their illustrious friends from the pre-war art world, people like Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Juan Miro. Lee took photographs and served lavish meals becoming a skilled gourmet cook.
But she found little peace. She was suffering from what would now be seen as classic symptoms of PTSD and was often moody, unpredictable, drinking heavily and prone to bouts of depression.
Her war experiences were, like the terrible childhood rape, packaged away and never spoken of and Lee became a largely forgotten figure to the outside world. To those who did remember her she was just someone who had once been a fashion model.
It wasn’t until after her death in 1977 that Lee and Roland’s son, Anthony Penrose, discovered a huge collection of her war photographs stashed in the attic. He has since worked tirelessly to preserve the astonishing archive she amassed over her long and varied working life to reinstate and preserve her artistic reputation.
Kate Winslet’s film Lee, which I saw yesterday, concentrates on the war years and is largely based on Penrose’s book The Lives of Lee Miller.
It has received mixed reviews with some critics, unfairly in my opinion, dismissing it as being superficial and failing to create a true characterisation of the enigmatic Lee Miller. But how could it? I suspect no one, not even her family and friends, got to know the real Lee.
I think Winslet does an excellent job telling an extraordinary story and delivers a powerful performance in the title role. Lee is beautifully filmed with painstaking reconstructions of several of her most striking photographs. There’s a stellar supporting cast too with particularly fine performances from Andy Samberg as David Scherman and Andrea Riseborough as the tirelessly supportive wartime Vogue editor Audrey Withers. Josh O’Connor meanwhile is perfect as Anthony Penrose and sets the context and scene in an imagined posthumous discussion with his ageing and alcoholic mother in the living room at Farleys
Winslet spent seven long years battling to get this film on screen working with director Ellen Kuras and to me the entire project exudes an appropriate sense of determination and commitment. Do go and see it if you possibly can.
If you want to know more about Lee Miller head for the East Sussex countryside and Farleys Farm. Lee and Roland moved there in 1949 and is still home to Anthony Penrose, the Lee Miller Archives and The Penrose Collection.
The House & Gallery and Garden are open every Thursday, Friday and Sunday (April – October) offering visitors the chance to take a tour of the house, relax in te garden and enjoy exhibitions in the gallery.
Farleys House & Gallery is at Muddles Green, Chiddingly, East Sussex, BN8 6HW. It’s just off the A22 between Uckfield and Hailsham and about a 20 minutes taxi journey from Lewes Station.