Kate Winslet on War Photographer Lee Miller, and the Film She Was Born to Make (2025)

“Kate held the film in her,” Solomon said. “If you spoke to her about any aspect of it, she knew what her opinion was. And when you have that, you can galvanize everyone behind that person. It looks effortless, but having lived with her, you can say: My God, it is a lot of work to get to that point.”

Winslet’s eyes are large and aqueous, her face seemingly lit from within. Every nuance of feeling is registered there, in the fine lines between brow furrow and half smile. She’s a master of dialect (from working-class Dorset in Ammonite to blowsy Brooklyn in Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel; from suburban Philadelphia in Mare of Easttown to cold, clipped German in The Reader), and she inhabits every character she plays, totally, physically, vocally, emotionally. Watching her in close-up, between the lines of dialogue, you can see multiple feelings cross her face—sometimes each individual thought.

“It’s really her authenticity and the way she puts everything she has in a part,” said Marion Cotillard, who plays Solange d’Ayen, a friend of Lee Miller’s who survived the Nazi occupation of France. “I look at her work and I never see her actually playing a role. I always see her being a person.”

Such was Winslet’s commitment to accuracy and verisimilitude for Lee that she spent hours in the archives at Farleys, poring over Miller’s diaries and letters and going through her contact sheets. She made sure her costumes replicated what Miller wore as a war correspondent. She learned how to operate the hand-​cranked Rolleiflex camera that Miller used, and several of the stills that appear in the film are, in fact, photographsWinslettook on set.

Many scenes were deliberately staged to replicate Miller’s historic images. The sequence that recreated the Dachau concentration camp, where Miller and Scherman were present at the liberation, was so carefully rendered that everyone on set was profoundly affected. “I knew it was going to be emotional and intense and it was,” Samberg told me. “I lost a lot of family in the Holocaust. It was definitely something that shook me.”

American Vogue ran Miller’s photographs of piles of emaciated corpses from the camps under the headline: “Believe It.” But, in a decision that angered and frustrated her, British Vogue only published one of Miller’s pictures from the camps in the context of a larger feature on victory overGermany.

Such questions, over how much reality to show, continue to this day. Penrose told me that after years of having to study Miller’s terrible, indelible photographs from the camps, he and other researchers suffered what he called a kind of “battle fatigue. We couldn’t stop seeing the images dayand night.”

I told him that I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine, aphotographer, who had returned from a field hospital on the front line in Ukraine, and who was, his voice shaky on the phone, still trying to process what he had seen and worried about how much of the gore he should hold back and self-​censor. “It’s a question we have to keep interrogating,” said Penrose, who sees a link between his mother’s work documenting the murderous horror of Nazi Germany and the nationalist invective being invoked by populist political leaders today. “We are never going to get anywhere in stopping these things from happening if we lie about them,” he said. “What I wanted in the film really was to show Lee’s commitment to the truth.”