It has been 47 years since Antony Penrose found thousands of photographs in the attic of his family home. They belonged to his mother, Lee Miller, an American war correspondent who gave us some of the most important and unforgettable images from the 20th century.
Penrose calls it a life-changing moment.
“I had to suddenly recognise that this woman, who I had thought was a useless drunk, actually had an incredible career. And the more we got into it, and the more we shared our findings with photographic curators and historians, we began to realise that this was a world-class collection of photography.”
In a heartfelt chat with The AJN, Penrose explained that alongside around 60,000 negatives, the boxes contained vintage prints, manuscripts, doctors’ prescriptions, camera repair bills and even his mother’s knuckle duster set and ammunition.
“But not her pistol,” Penrose laughed.
Lee Miller’s life is now the subject of a blockbuster movie, Lee, starring Kate Winslet as Lee and Andy Samberg as Lee’s friend David E. Scherman.
According to Penrose, it’s the “real Lee” who is portrayed in the film, with Winslet working very closely with Penrose to bring the film to life.
While Penrose described Winslet’s research as “seemingly random”, he said she definitely found the photographer.
“It was this immersive pursuit of Lee through all of her work,” Penrose recalled. “It was tracking her, following her, watching her. As if Kate was the hunter. And eventually, she did find Lee, and she built up the most convincing representation of her that I could wish to see.”
The film follows Miller as she turns her back on her modelling career and finds her photographic one – tired of being viewed through a lens, Miller is focused exclusively on her own work behind the camera.
As the threat of war looms, Miller follows the love of her life, art dealer Roland Penrose, to the UK where she begins working as a photographer for British Vogue. After jumping through a series of hoops and joining forces with Scherman, Miller finds herself on the frontline of World War II. While Scherman and Miller become a fierce team, it’s clear that the latter is always the leader.
“She was not going to be a passenger in anybody’s wagon. She was going to be the driver,” Penrose pointed out.
Miller was the one who climbed into the cattle car as Dachau was liberated to photograph the corpses, she’s the one who talked her way into Hitler’s apartment, making Scherman photograph her in Hitler’s bathtub in Munich at the same time Hitler was committing suicide in Berlin.
In a poignant scene for Jewish audiences especially, it’s while they’re in Hitler’s apartment that Scherman finally breaks down. With the surname Scherman, the assumption is of course that the photographer is Jewish, and while walking around Dachau, Samberg does a brilliant job at grappling with what he is seeing, but it’s in Hitler’s apartment when he finally succumbs to his emotions, breaking down in Miller’s arms saying, “all those people, all those people, they were my people”.
It was a heartbreaking moment that Penrose worked through with Winslet.
“I knew Scherman very well,” Penrose explained. “So, I kept asking, how would he react? He was a very personal, undemonstrative person. What would he have said? It would have been an understatement.”
“She was not going to be a passenger in anybody’s wagon. She was going to be the driver.”
Samberg truly shines in his role as Scherman, a first serious part for the comedic actor, who has admitted to being very nervous about taking on such a dramatic role, something that took him way out of his comfort zone.
“When I met him, it was on the set in Budapest,” Penrose recalled. “We were having dinner one evening, and Andy was teasing Kate, and it was exactly like listening to Scherman teasing my mum. And I thought this is going to work. And it did. They brought different skills to each other. It was certainly a beautiful friendship, and that friendship lasted right up until [Lee] died. And then Scherman became one of the most important people in my life.”
Another moment that is beautifully portrayed, and one which very much encouraged Miller to investigate what was actually happening in Europe at the time, was when the photographer returned to Paris during the war to try to find her friends. She finds her friend Solange in the ruins of her beautiful home, surrounding by Nazi paraphernalia.
“When Lee got back to Paris, these people were gone without a trace. And this was something that to begin with, couldn’t be understood. Yes, they were taken away but where to and why? What was going on? She needed to find out,” Penrose said.
“The truth became more and more apparent and that was the moment that Lee wanted to show the world what had happened. This was personal for her. She could have ignored it, she could have gone on to photograph a lot of other things, but for her, she needed to make sure that others knew the fate of all these people.”
Penrose explained that Miller had no prejudice about race, colour or creed. It was something that she was criticised for, and it’s something that is portrayed in the film. Miller didn’t care who needed help or whose story needed to be told – she helped, and she shared. And she made sure people knew what was going on.
While discussing that it wasn’t just the Jews who Hitler targeted – it was the artist community (which Miller was part of), the gypsies, the homosexuals, the mentally ill and more – Penrose said Miller was adamant that the world needed to know.
“It was a total solution, the final solution,” he shuddered. “It just shows that if you tell enough lies for long enough, nobody knows what the truth is.”
Miller’s impact is ongoing, even today, as she influences and inspires particularly young women.
“There are not many days or weeks that go by without a woman saying to me, ‘Lee Miller was my inspiration. I read about her, I heard about her, and that caused me to…’ and then there’s a whole series of options – dump an abusive relationship, dump a dead-end career, follow my dreams, become a photographer and in one or two cases, become a war photographer,” Penrose said. “And I think to myself that this is significant, that she is inspiring people to make changes in their lives.”
Penrose also spoke about the way Miller’s story has encouraged abuse victims to come forward, again something that is documented in the film.
“I’ve always talked very openly about the way she was abused and violated as a child. It has been a shock at how many women say this is also their experience. I find it utterly shameful that there is so much abuse of women and children going on in this world right now, right here, and it’s invisible. I’m just so thrilled that this is [starting to be] talked about more openly now.”
Penrose explained that sharing Miller’s story and her photographs is an important cause for him, his late wife and his daughter, along with all the others who work in the Lee Miller Archive.
“It was the Spanish American poet George Santayana who said, those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it. And that is my maxim, because discovering all this stuff and working on it, it’s only recently that I realised that I have a responsibility, which is as a guardian of history,” Penrose said.
“And history is no damn good unless somebody knows about it. It’s our job, my job, to get that stuff out there so people can learn about it and make their own choices. And that’s why I find this film so important, because there are literally millions of people who are going to see it.”
Lee is screening in cinemas Australia-wide from October 24.
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