Kate Winslet battled for eight long years to get her biopic of American war photographer Lee Miller made, and this week finally saw its UK release. The Lee in question is the American-born Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, a remarkable woman whose glamorous and colourful life has often overshadowed her photographic career.
Miller was not only a top fashion model for magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, she was also an important female surrealist photographer and a courageous war correspondent who documented the atrocities of the second world war.
Lee Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, a small industrial town 90 miles north of New York City. Her father, Theodore, was an engineer, inventor and amateur photographer who encouraged Miller’s interest in photography, buying her her first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie, at the age of ten.
