CULTURE
As a new film chronicles the life of Jazz Age model and World War II photographer Lee Miller, Megan Conner reflects on the groundbreaking legacy of an overlooked icon
'The word “muse” gets thrown around. It irritates me to my core,’ writes Kate Winslet in the foreword to Lee Miller: Photographs, a recent collection of 100 images of the model-turnedphotographer-turned war-correspondent’s life and work. ‘To me, she was a life force to be reckoned with, so much more than an object of attention from the famous men with whom she is associated.’
Miller’s is a mettle that Winslet knows well, since it’s taken her eight years to fully realise Lee, the biopic of Miller’s life that she both stars in and produced. In bringing her story to the screen, Winslet has described ‘the most phenomenal fight’ – not least to finance the film (with Winslet at one point personally covering two weeks’ wages for the production crew until investment came together), as well as an active search for a (female) director who wouldn’t be preoccupied with stories of Miller’s many celebrity friends and lovers.
Based on the 1985 memoir The Lives Of Lee Miller, written by Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, in the years following her death, Lee chooses to focus on Miller’s time working for Vogue as a photojour nalist during World War II – a time when women were rarely given accreditation to enter combat zones, and fashion magazines certainly weren’t known for covering them. ‘I have eaten the butter, so now I will face the guns,’ Miller wrote home to her family in America as she witnessed the first day of the Blitz on one of her famous detours to London. The film’s opening sequence depicts Miller, camera in hand, as she accompanies the Allied advance across Europe.
