KATE’S HERO
Actress ‘overwhelmed’ to play death camp snapper Lee Miller in a new biopic
She was a woman who defied expectations but the story of actress-turned-Second World War photographer Lee Miller is a truly harrowing one.
The formidable ex-model, once famously pictured in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub, was among the first to document the full horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, with her Dachau pictures seen worldwide.
But as a woman in the 1940s, and a former girlfriend of Pablo Picasso, Lee also had to fight prejudice.
And it’s that battle that made Oscar winner Kate Winslet determined to honour the trailblazer on film with her new biopic, Lee.
Yet as the first trailer was released this week, Kate reveals it wasn’t just Lee’s bravery that haunts her, she feels Lee herself might too.
For Kate sustained a freak back injury that left her in the same sort of pain as the late photojournalist she was playing.
“We did war battle scenes and the day before, I slipped,” explains Titanic star Kate, 48.
“I really injured my back very badly and I thought, ‘Oh God are we in trouble? What are we going to do?’
“So I just said to myself, ‘I’m just going to keep going.
It’s going to be fine’.”
Kate took a tumble while shooting a scene where Lee runs down a street in the French coastal city of Saint
Malo while under bombardment in 1944.
The actress battled on despite three “massive haematomas” to her spine, and became convinced that maybe the real Lee was trying to help her understand what she really went through.
Kate says: “I was really in a lot of pain but then I did think to myself, ‘Well, this is probably Lee. She’s probably doing this to me because she very famously injured her back.
“‘She’s pulling the levers all the time’. I just thought, ‘Right, OK, she was in pain, I’m in pain... OK, let’s go’.
“Sometimes it’s just what you have to do.”
Kate’s brand of method acting did not extend to trying one of Lee’s experimental treatments though.
“To alleviate the pain at one point in her life she even got someone to make a bear, a real bear, sit on her back,” says Kate, incredulous. “She thought that was going to help. I didn’t do that!”
The movie marks the feature film debut of acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras.
It documents Lee’s early career as a fashion model and a small-time actress in New York during the roaring 1920s (“She wasn’t good”, says Kate of Lee’s acting skills), before depicting her time as a war photojournalist for Vogue, covering The Blitz, the Liberation of Paris and the Nazi death camps.
Rather randomly, it was a piece of furniture that inspired Kate to tell Lee’s story on the big screen.
She says: “A good friend of mine works for an auction house selling wonderful old furniture, and I love old tables that have a history. And it was a table that had existed in the kitchen of Lee Miller and her husband Roland Penrose in England, and there were photographs by Man Ray, Picasso... they were all around this table.
“I sat at the table and I put my hands on it, and I thought, ‘Wow, Lee Miller. Why hasn’t anybody made a film about her?’ I went and I met Anthony Penrose, her son, and that was the beginning.”
Kate spent five years developing Lee alone, and another two with co-producer Kate Solomon, before the shoot in Budapest even began.
“The role of a producer is completely different to the job of an actor,” she admits.
“I realised when I was going into it, I actually don’t know what I’m doing! How to actually put a film together from scratch by myself ?”
She reportedly paid the entire cast and supporting crew’s salaries out of her own pocket for two weeks and phoned many of the actors she hoped to cast directly.
She says: “We just put together literally our wish-list, our dream cast list and then I said, ‘Well, now what do we do?’ [Kate Solomon] said, ‘Well, phone them up’. I was like, ‘I don’t really know them’. [But] I just personally started to ask each of these wonderful actors if they would come and join us and we were just so lucky, everybody said yes.”
The enthusiasm from the cast, which includes Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Josh O’Connor and Alexander Skarsgard, came from a desire to depict the dark Nazi death camp scenes for historical reference.
Lee’s son Anthony, 77, also asked to appear in the Dachau scenes to honour his mother’s work. Of course, they were harrowing to film.
“There were cast members who were lying naked, on the top of a pile of bodies,” says Kate. “And I kept thanking them between takes. They kept looking up at me and saying ‘no, it’s important’.
“Lee’s son Anthony said, ‘I want to be in this scene’ and we said, ‘Why?’ and he said ‘I need to’. So in a scene
where we walk through an archway and Lee locks eyes with a prisoner, that’s Anthony. It was just so important to him. He’s an amazing man.”
As well as informing audiences about Lee’s legacy, Kate hopes the movie will educate more people about the perils of posttraumatic stress disorder.
Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Lee fell for British surrealist painter Roland Penrose in 1937.
After the war, they bought Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex, and had Anthony two years later. The home became a haven for their artistic friends including Picasso, Max Ernst and Man Ray, but Lee was haunted by the war and suffered terrible PTSD.
She died from cancer aged 70 in 1977. Kate says: “[PTSD] really did destroy her. And that’s why, like so many people who experienced the war, she just never spoke about it.”
Kate also hopes the movie, which is out nationwide on September 13, will continue her important campaigning for female empowerment. That’s why she delayed its release when the Hollywood strikes meant actors were banned from speaking about their movies.
“I wanted to be able to talk about the labour of love it was for me,” says Kate. “It is hard to make films as a woman and it is hard to make films about women.
“I hope [after Lee] people will be more open-eared and open-eyed to absorb films about figures like the formidable Lee Miller. There is nobody like her in the world. I felt overwhelmed to play her.”
It sounds like a bout of back pain, whether by Lee’s intervention or not, was probably worth it. And not just for the Oscars buzz.