Kate Winslet’s Lee Miller Biopic Deemed 'Too Conventional'

Lee Miller b. 1907, United States Follow +

Lee, a biopic about fashion model turned artist and war photographer Lee Miller (1907–1977) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.

The film has been a personal passion project for British actress and producer Kate Winslet since 2015, and critics described her performance as Oscar-worthy in certain scenes.

Nonetheless, some commentators disliked the film’s conventional framing and lack of attention to Miller’s process, which The Art Newspaper said, ‘falls short of its subject’s artistry’.

The Guardian described it as ‘a bullet point-ticking list of events gussied up to be an actual movie, while the BBC said the framing of the story around an interview with an older Miller was ‘too conventional to match the unconventional Miller.’

Lee has yet to secure international distribution. Meanwhile, fans of Miller—who was said to be ‘the possessor of the most beautiful navel in Paris’ and a Surrealist photographer in her own right—can learn more about her at the exhibition Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends at Gagosian from 11 November to 22 December.

The exhibition will explore the relationship between Miller and English painter Roland Penrose, whom she married in 1947 after divorcing her first husband, Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey.

The show features photographs by the couple alongside works by artists in their social circle such as Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso. —[O]

Main image: Kate Winslet during the filming of Lee (2023). Courtesy of Toronto International Film Festival.