Lee – released last month in the UK – is the highly anticipated and critically acclaimed film telling the story of Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller, the fashion model turned World War II journalist and photographer, who was a war correspondent for Vogue magazine. It’s a remarkable, thrilling account of an artist who changed the way we see.
Miller is played by Kate Winslet, who also produced the film – it took eight years to make. The cast includes Marion Cotillard, Andy Samberg, Noémie Merlant, Josh O’Connor and Alexander Skarsgård, and follows Miller through a dramatic decade in her career, when Miller abandoned her role as a model and muse in New York and went to the frontline in Europe to document the horrors inflicted by the Nazi regime. She was one of the few women at the time to do so.
Miller’s dramatic, sometimes surrealist images of camps, conflicts, and at hospitals that would have an enduring impact and legacy (the American photographer died in 1977) but were not without personal consequences. The film evokes Miller’s dedication, magnetism and humanity – something seen in her photographs too. A major exhibition on Lee Miller opens at Tate Britain in October 2025.
