Lee (2023) on Netflix
NR20231h 56mBiographyDramaHistory
Lee Miller, once a New York fashion model, falls in love with Roland Penrose and moves to London. Barred from combat, she photographs the Blitz for British Vogue.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.9/1036,372 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes67%
Featurette
Plot summary
Lee Miller is living in France as a photographer when she meets Roland Penrose, and the two fall in love. She moves with him to London, where British Vogue gives her work. Through the Blitz she photographs the city and the people living through it, and she wants to document more of the war, but the United Kingdom does not allow women to serve near combat, so her assignments keep her at home. That changes once the United States joins the war and she is sent to report from Europe alongside the photojournalist David Scherman, recording what the fighting does to the places and people it reaches.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Lee (2023)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film took eight years to make, and at one point, with funding precarious, producer and star Kate Winslet paid the entire cast and crew's salaries for two weeks out of her own money.
- On the first day of shooting, Kate Winslet slipped and injured her back while rehearsing a scene of Lee Miller running down a street in Saint-Malo under bombardment, and she kept filming despite barely being able to stand up; that month production paused when she was taken to hospital.
- Alexander Skarsgård replaced Jude Law in the role of Roland Penrose when the rest of the cast was confirmed in October 2022.
- Kate Winslet wrote a letter to Marion Cotillard asking her to play French Vogue editor Solange d'Ayen; the two had previously co-starred in Contagion.
- The film's recreation of Lee Miller's photograph of herself in Adolf Hitler's bathtub was taken by photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was recommended to Kate Winslet by Vogue's then editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
- While overseeing the recording of Alexandre Desplat's score at Abbey Road Studios, Kate Winslet spotted Jonathan Evans-Jones, the actor who had played Titanic violinist Wallace Hartley, in the orchestra; it was their first reunion and first conversation since she starred in Titanic in 1997, and it was later shown on 60 Minutes.
- The project started when cinematographer Ellen Kuras, in a New York bookshop, spotted a book about war photographer Lee Miller, noticed Miller's similarity to Kate Winslet, with whom she had worked on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and sent Winslet a copy of the book.
