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Kate Winslet has explained why she thinks model and war photographer Lee Miller took her infamous picture in Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s bathtub.
Winslet, 48, stars as Miller, in her new film Lee. She consulted with the late photojournalist’s son to get into character for the film, as part of a passion project which has taken her nearly a decade to complete.
Miller took the picture in Hitler’s bathroom on the same day that the Fuhrer killed himself along with his family as the Allies closed in on them at the end of the Second World War.
In the picture, the model sits in the tub soaping her shoulder with a portrait of Hitler visible in the background, while on the mat next to her is a pair of dirty boots.
“Listen, at that stage of things they had not changed their clothes for six weeks,” she told BBC Radio 4 on Thursday (12 September). “This is true. They hadn’t changed their clothes for six weeks, and they hadn’t touched hot water for six weeks, ok?”
The Oscar-winning actor explained Miller had walked into the horrors of the Holocaust as she arrived in the Dachau concentration camp to “bear witness” to the atrocities.
The photographer then drove to Munich, where she knew the address of Hitler’s apartment in Prinzregentenplatz, (”Like Downing Street, people know where it is,” she added).
“There was a guy on the door keeping guard,” Winslet continued. “Lee using her wiles would have bribed him with a carton of cigarettes or half a bottle of brandy. She was very, very good at finding the things that she really needed to keep her going.”
When Miller arrived inside the apartment, Winslet said “there was an entire regiment in there having a party”.
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“Then they discovered there was a bathroom. There are many photographs of other people using that bathroom – soldiers, GIs having a shave.
“I myself can perfectly well see how as a woman in that situation where she hadn’t had any clean knickers for six weeks, can you imagine turning that tap on and going ‘Ah it’s hot water?’
“I think there was something in her that thought it would be logical to take a bath.”
Winslet added that the team decided that Miller would have realised at that moment, “This is a photograph that no one else is going to get, or even think or even dare to take”.
She commended the photographer’s bravery as she said, “Lee had that in her, she was a risk taker. She really was. She took chances.”
