Who was Lee Miller? Why the model-turned-war photographer is finally getting her due

The Vogue model, surrealist artist and World War II photographer is now the subject of a Kate Winslet-led biopic, new monograph and major gallery show.

A surrealist with an incisive eye, finding the beauty and absurdity of everyday life. A model who posed for Vogue and sat for Pablo Picasso and Man Ray, but whose fashion career was suddenly cut short. A war photographer who embedded with the US military to chronicle the harrowing events of World War II — and posed defiantly in Hitler’s bathtub on the day of his death. Lee Miller was an American artist who remade herself many times without straying from the principles that guided her life and career. When she died in 1977, her photographic work had largely been forgotten; her own family was unaware of the scope of her practice, and what she witnessed in the war, until they found her cache of negatives. Now, five decades later, she’s the subject of the Kate Winslet-led biopic “Lee,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, as well as a recent monograph of her work and an ongoing exhibition at mega-gallery Gagosian in New York, where some of her prints are for sale. Her son, photographer Antony Penrose — whose father was the British surrealist painter Roland Penrose, whom Miller married in 1947 — has made it his life’s work to bring attention to his mother’s legacy. He co-directs her archive with his daughter, Ami Bouhassane, and has authored multiple books about Miller, including the most recent, “Lee Miller: Photographs.” For the past decade, he’s consulted on “Lee” as it came together, and has finally begun its run in both the United Kingdom and Spain. (A US release date has yet to be confirmed.) “There were movies proposed and very nearly made before,” Pentose said in a video call with CNN. “This is the one that we’ve been waiting for, because I feel it is a brilliant rendition of Lee’s life, values and personality.” He still recalls how “bewildering” it was when he and his late wife, Suzanna, found some 60,000 of her negatives and prints in their attic shortly after Miller’s death. She had developed a unique surrealist way of looking at the world, capturing everyday eccentricities that play with the viewer’s perception: a scratched-up door at a jewelry store becomes a small explosion of sparks; tar spilled on the street glistens darkly like some deep-sea or cave-bound creature. But her range was staggering. Here was Elsa Schiaparelli supine among two cheetah sculptures, and Marlene Dietrich posing in dramatic sun in the designer’s ruched house coat. Here was a crowd of people spitting on four women, their heads shaved, as they went to trial for accusations of associating with Nazis. Here were the bodies of concentration camp victims in Dachau, and the liberated prisoners standing over a pile of human bones.