"I didn’t waste a minute"
How do you bring the extraordinary story of model-turned-war reporter Lee Miller to the big screen? Having Kate Winslet on board helped, reveals screenwriter Marion Hume
© Lee Miller Archives
- Marion Hume
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Elizabeth “Lee” Miller was astonishing and exasperating. Over the long journey to get our biopic Lee to the screen, she kept surprising, inspiring and exhausting us. She packed so much into her 70 years of life that the challenge was never, “What shall we put in?” but, “What on earth can we leave out?”
The movie introduces us to Miller in middle age, by which time she had already lived multiple lives across two continents – not for nothing is the biography on which Lee is based called The Lives of Lee Miller. The book was written by Miller’s son, Antony (Tony) Penrose, almost 40 years ago – and Penrose would be the first to admit that he’s continued on a journey of discovery to truly know his mother ever since.
So, who was Lee Miller? An American born at the turn of the 20th century, she belonged to a family that was neither rich nor poor, living on the edge of a town of no great renown. But before she was out of her teens, Miller was out of Poughkeepsie and living in Paris. As a young woman, she was a Vogue model in the 1920s, and a Second World War correspondent in middle age. She was a beauty who changed her clothes for a living, who then went to war with hardly a change of underwear. Whatever her circumstances, she adapted and kept moving. She loved, she lusted and in all things she was brave. I think her biggest fear was being bored.
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When we get to know Miller in the movie, hers is the joy of glorious, confident middle age. She’s her own woman. Of all her many skills, her greatest, at this golden stage in her life, is leaving the past behind her.
A quick recap of that past. After living in Paris at the height of the Jazz Age, where a bottle of champagne cost less than a glass of lemonade back home, Miller moved to New York and began a dazzling career as a fashion model – a risqué profession in the late 1920s – that landed her on the cover of Vogue. Back then, the magazine’s cover images were illustrations, yet Miller was also a photographic model: an image of her in a second-skin satin evening gown saw her become the first real woman to feature in an advertisement for a female sanitary product. Miller being Miller, she turned the ensuing scandal into a handy excuse to leave America again and get back to Paris, which she always felt was her natural home.
Kate Winslet as Lee Miller in Lee SKY
Montparnasse was the red-hot centre of café culture in the most sophisticated city in the world. There Miller dazzled on the arm of her fellow American, the artist Man Ray, who she towered over – a fact that appears to have bothered the immaculately attired couple not one jot. Both were delighted to work with the still-new Vogue Paris (now Vogue France), for whom Lee worked on both sides of the camera. But when Man Ray passed his lover’s creative inventions off as his own, her ardour cooled. What remained was a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives. When we meet Miller in the movie, lounging with her friends in the south of France, Man Ray is with her, next to his new lover, Ady Fidelin.
The concept of friendship is central to understanding Lee Miller. Men wanted her, and women wanted to be her, yet she valued friendship from either sex most of all. There were the elegant French women Solange d’Ayen and Nusch Eluard (portrayed in Lee by Marion Cotillard and Noémie Merlant), and the rather more uptight Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), the no-nonsense editor of British Vogue who was well aware she would never have held such a position but for the fact that, by the time she was appointed, there was a war on.
At the centre of Lee is the story of a middle-aged woman’s journey through that war. Miller faced exceptional barriers, not least the fact that she reported and photographed for an unlikely publication, British Vogue (which shared her content with the US edition). The first hurdle Miller encountered was none other than Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery, commander of all Allied ground troops, who, when asked if he would allow women to join the D-Day press corps replied, “I will not tolerate them”. At which point Miller conveniently remembered that she was American – something she had equally conveniently forgotten four years earlier when American civilians had been ordered to catch the last boats across the Atlantic on the eve of war. Thus Miller became one of America’s “D-Day Dames”, to whom the US War Department made clear they were not to cover combat. The ruling that women reporters could “go no further than women’s services go” was ignored by Miller at the earliest opportunity.
Beyond the physical resemblance, Winslet is as unstoppable as Miller
So, how to capture such a mercurial woman on film? As Lee’s co-screenwriter, alongside Liz Hannah and John Collee, I had the enormous good fortune of working closely with both Kate Winslet, who portrays Miller on screen, and with Tony Penrose.
The indefatigable Winslet drove this project from day one. Many have noted the uncanny resemblance between her and Miller; indeed, there’s a photo taken of Miller in August 1944 at the Liberation of Paris when even I struggle to tell them apart. Yet the similarity goes way beyond physical resemblance. Both were and are unstoppable and courageous. The answer to the oft-asked question about why Lee is special lies, in significant part, in what Winslet brought to it, on and off screen. She brought everything.
Andy Samberg and Kate Winslet in Lee. Sky
As for Tony Penrose? What an extraordinary privilege it was for us all to have unfettered access to his late mother. There was no question one didn’t dare ask; nothing was off-limits. And we lost count of the times the brilliant research team at Farleys – the Sussex farm where Lee lived post-war with Roland Penrose, where Tony grew up and which now houses the Lee Miller Archives – dug out memos, letters and diaries that led us to a deeper understanding. Among my favourite items is a note Miller wrote to Penrose (who is played in the film by Alexander Skarsgard). “I keep saying to everyone, ‘I didn’t waste a minute, all my life – I had a wonderful time’,” it reads. “But I know, myself, now that if I had it over again I’d be even more free, with my body and my affections.”
When Miller met Penrose in the balmy warmth of a French summer before the Second World War, it was as if a bolt of lightning had struck the pair. And it seemed only the mildest inconvenience that both were married to other people at the time. But they remained friends with their exes: Penrose’s French wife, Valentine Boué, was staying in a London hotel that was bombed in the Blitz so, naturally, joined Penrose and Miller in their Hampstead home; and Miller’s Egyptian husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, travelled to the UK after the war to finalise their divorce and to bless his ex-wife’s union with Penrose.
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When a movie is based on a real person, you “hang out” with them for a long time. Far from ever having enough of Lee Miller, all we wanted to know was more. The movie begins with a young journalist asking her why she did what she did. As a journalist myself, how I envy him. Oh, to have sat opposite Miller, notebook on knee.
Authors
Marion Hume
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