This might be cinema’s most specific No Strings Attached/Friends With Benefits situation yet. This year is giving us two whole movies about tough-as-nails female war photographers who just happen to be named Lee—Civil War and now Kate Winslet’s Lee, which premieres September 27 in theaters.But while it is funny that the two films are releasing within five months of each other—especially since Winslet has been grinding to get Lee made for eight years now, according to Vogue—the shared name is no coincidence. Kirsten Dunst’s Civil War character was inspired by Lee Miller, the real-life subject of the Winslet-led biopic. Miller even gets an explicit shout-out early in the Alex Garland film, when Cailee Spaeny’s character commends her fictional mentor for getting close to the action just like her 20th century namesake. In real life, Miller is known as the former model who went on to capture and publish some of “the 20th century's most indelible images of war, including an iconic photo of Miller herself, posing defiantly in Hitler's private bathtub,” per the film’s logline. It continues: “Miller had a profound understanding and empathy for women and the voiceless victims of war. Her images display both the fragility and ferocity of the human experience. Above all, the film shows how Miller lived her life at full-throttle in pursuit of truth, for which she paid a huge personal price, forcing her to confront a traumatic and deeply buried secret from her childhood.”Unfortunately, Winslet faced a similar glass ceiling while trying to produce the film that Miller did in her own day. “I’ve… had a director say to me: ‘Listen, you do my film and I’ll get your little Lee funded…’ Little!” she told Vogue in 2023. “Or we’d have potential male investors saying things like: ‘Tell me, why am I supposed to like this woman?’” Still, she pressed on, even when she had to pay the cast and crews’ wages out of her own pocket for two weeks or film nude scenes that made her anxious. “You know I had to be really fucking brave about letting my body be its softest version of itself and not hiding from that,” she said. “And believe me, people amongst our own team would say, ‘You might just want to sit up a bit.’ And I’d go, ‘Why? [Because of] the bit of flesh you can see? No, that’s the way it’s going to be!’”Lee was directed by Ellen Kuras in her feature-length debut, and adapted from Antony Penrose’s 1985 biography The Lives of Lee Miller by Liz Hannah, Marion Hume, John Collee. The film also stars Josh O’Connor, Andrea Riseborough, Alexander Skarsgård, Marion Cotillard, and Andy Samberg in his first dramatic role.
