The Real Story Behind the ‘Lee’ Movie and Lee Miller, the Legendary Surrealist Photographer and World War II Journalist Who Inspired It

When Antony Penrose was a young boy in postwar England, he knew his mother, Lee Miller, was a photographer. She taught him how to use her boxy Rolleiflex camera, and he accompanied her when she visited and photographed other artists in her circle, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Man Ray.

But there were gaps in Penrose’s knowledge. He never knew, for instance, that Miller was a legendary war correspondent for Vogue who was embedded in the front lines during World War II and took some of the most defining images of the conflict. She simply never talked about that period in her life.

Shortly after his mother died in 1977, Penrose and his wife, Suzanna, welcomed a daughter, Ami. They climbed up to Miller’s attic and popped open long-shut boxes to track down baby photos of Penrose to compare with their newborn. Instead, they stumbled onto a pile of thin pages containing a manuscript titled “The Siege of St. Malo.”

“It was this incredibly up-close and personal account of a hideous battle,” Penrose says. “She’d watched guys that she was joking with a few hours before being mowed down by machine gun fire.”

He asked his father, the artist and art collector Roland Penrose, if the author was indeed Miller. Roland chuckled and gave his son a copy of the article in a back issue of Vogue. Penrose had much to learn about his mother’s many lives.

The lives of Lee Miller

Since the day he found the draft of “The Siege of St. Malo” in his childhood attic, Penrose has dedicated most of his adult life to stewarding his mother’s remarkable legacy. He’s the author of a 1985 biography about her, The Lives of Lee Miller, and the co-director (with his daughter, Ami Bouhassane) of the Lee Miller Archives, based at the photographer’s former farm and house in East Sussex, England.

The latest effort to preserve Miller’s legacy is Lee, a biopic directed by Ellen Kuras. Starring Kate Winslet in the title role, the film is based on Penrose’s book. It draws on material housed at the Lee Miller Archives, which gave Kuras unprecedented access to its namesake’s papers.

LEE | Official Trailer | In Theaters September 27

In Lee, Penrose, played by Josh O’Connor of “The Crown,” sits down with his aging, curmudgeonly mother to record flashbacks of Miller’s life, focusing mainly on the years surrounding the war. The memories stand in stark contrast to each other: In one, she’s lounging with artist types in the prewar south of France. In another, she’s taking photographs under siege in the broken cities of Europe.

In real life, Miller never spoke about these years with Penrose. It’s easier to understand her silence in retrospect. “There was a natural modesty, natural humility,” Penrose says. “But also, I think that what none of us understood at the time was that she was suffering acutely from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Beset by funding and production difficulties, Lee was more than eight years in the making. At one point, Winslet, who championed the story and co-produced the film, personally paid the entire cast and crew’s wages for two weeks when funding stalled.

Lee—now playing in theaters across the United States—confronts Miller’s legacy, not just as a model and muse, but as an active participant in the 20th century’s most defining moments; a courageous artist; and an imperfect, shattered human. Miller’s many lives need little embellishment.

Model, muse and artist

In 1927, magazine magnate Condé Montrose Nast pulled a drifting, 19-year-old girl from Poughkeepsie, New York, out of incoming Manhattan traffic and into the world of high fashion and modeling.

Things moved quickly from there. A drawing of Miller appeared on the March 15, 1927, cover of one of Nast’s flagship magazines, Vogue. Clad in a purple cloche hat, with a dark urban background obstructed by her long blue eyes and a bauble of pearls around her neck, Miller was officially a New York City model.

But she left for Paris just two years later, not content with being a static image on magazine covers and in Kotex ads. She sought out Man Ray, the Dadaist and Surrealist photographer, to act as her mentor, and they worked together to develop the technique of solarization, in which the tone of a snapshot is reversed.

Blood of a Poet(Mirror Scene)

The pair became lovers, too, and together, they flitted around the Surrealist circles of interwar Europe and New York. Miller played the female lead—a marble statue with no arms—in The Blood of a Poet, an avant-garde film by Jean Cocteau. Her lips and eyes became iconic pieces of Surrealist art.

In 1934, Miller married an Egyptian businessman named Aziz Eloui Bey and moved to Cairo, where she kept up her photography without the financial pressures of her earlier career. But the elegant, domestic life left her restless, so she bounced back around Europe—Paris, the Balkans, rural England—this time with Penrose’s father, Roland.

Lee Miller’s surreal war

After ending her first marriage on amicable terms, Miller settled with Roland in England, arriving around the time of the outbreak of World War II.

Despite the gap in her resume, Miller again applied to Vogue, which took her on as a photographer to replace the men now fighting in the war. The normal fashion work resumed, supposedly a happy distraction from wartime grimness, but it left Miller unsatisfied as German bombs fell in the city around her.

Ever headstrong, she took matters into her own hands, processing her own striking photos of war-torn London in Vogue’s offices and contributing 22 images to Grim Glory, a book about the Blitz.

Miller was accredited as a photographer by the U.S. Army in 1942, but she mostly covered women’s work, not combat. Until the siege of St. Malo, a coastal town in France, in 1944, she stuck to scenes like nurses at a base in Oxford, England. Still, she managed to reinvent these photographs through a Surrealist lens: In one snapshot, for instance, she captured a nurse cleaning rubber gloves, which jut out from drying racks like dozens of disembodied hands.

“I’ve often said that I feel the only meaningful training for being a war correspondent is first of all to be a Surrealist, because then nothing is too unusual,” Penrose says.

When Vogue’s editors assigned Miller to cover the liberation of St. Malo, they assumed the town had already been freed by the Allies. But the fighting had only begun. Though she wasn’t accredited to cover combat, Miller was the only reporter embedded with the troops. She refused to let the story pass.

The article Miller subsequently wrote for Vogue (the same one discovered by Penrose in his mother’s attic some three decades later) is a vivid, frank and subjective account of the siege, from the belches of gunfire to the long waits on the backlines.

“Stricken lonely cats prowled. A swollen horse had not provided adequate shelter for the dead American behind it. … Flower pots stood in roomless windows,” Miller wrote in fragmentary prose as she gazed at the fragments of the town and the armies.

She continued:

My heel ground into a dead detached hand … and I cursed the Germans for the sordid, ugly destruction they had conjured up in this once-beautiful town. I wondered where my friends were … that I’d known here before the war … how many had been forced into disloyalty and degradation … how many had been shot, starved or what. I picked up the hand and hurled it across the street and ran back the way I’d come, bruising my feet and crashing in the unsteady piles of stone and slipping in blood. Christ, it was awful.

The legacies of Lee Miller

The horrors of the war in Europe continued, and so did Miller’s work to document them for posterity.

She and her close companion David E. Scherman, a correspondent at Life magazine, were among the first members of the press to enter the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp on April 30, 1945. The scenes they saw there defied reality. Along with her photos and article, Miller sent her editor back in London a cable: “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.” Vogue published her photos of the camp, juxtaposed with the banality of German life in nearby villages, and titled the spread “Believe It.”

Later on April 30, Miller and Scherman went to Munich and camped in Adolf Hitler’s old apartment, which had been converted into a U.S. Army post. They went through his things—which appeared to be frighteningly normal—and she posed in Hitler’s bathtub on the same day that he died by suicide across the country in Berlin.

“It’s tempting to cast the photograph of Miller’s bath as a talisman of triumph, a middle finger, a cleansing ritual,” writes artist Chris Wiley for the New Yorker. “With the monster vanquished, the stink of evil can begin to be scrubbed away. But, of course, it doesn’t really work that way.”

After the war, Miller struggled to find her place in the peacetime world of magazines and art. She tried to be a staff photographer for Vogue but chafed against the editors. In 1956, she gave up journalism for good, instead deciding to train as a gourmet cook and publish recipes.

But Miller continued to struggle with her mental health. Penrose, who was born in 1947, describes his mother during this period as an “alcoholic” and “depressive.” They had a “pretty dire” relationship. A nanny mostly raised him.

Then, sometime in the early 1970s, Penrose hatched a scheme to drive around the world in a Land Rover with his cousin and a friend from the nearby village. As they prepared, he recalls, his mother “became a different person,” buoyed by the prospect of adventure, and she offered the boys practical wisdom.

When Penrose returned to England some 72,000 miles later, he and his mother became as close as “two old pals” for the final years of her life.

But Miller still didn’t tell Penrose about the war. Those stories were still a bundle of trauma, photographs and manuscript pages that she carried by herself and left in untouched boxes in her attic. It was only after Miller’s death that Penrose discovered and began to share her remarkable story with the world. Without his work, Miller might have been remembered only as a muse and model. Her many other lives might never have inspired others.

“There’s not many weeks that go by without me meeting someone, usually a young woman, who says that Lee has inspired them to change their career and go off and often become a photographer, sometimes even a combat photographer; to dump toxic relationships; to really just be themselves in their lives and be what they want to be instead of following other people’s expectations,” Penrose says. “And I find that intensely rewarding.”