Kate Winslet gets seal of approval from Lee Miller’s son as she is cast in new biopic
As the Second World War correspondent for Vogue, Miller photographed the Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the horror of the concentration camps
Tony Penrose, son of the , has said that he “cannot think of anyone better” to play his mother than Kate Winslet, who has been cast in a new biopic of the Second World War correspondent.
“She [Winslet] is gritty, she’s funny, she’s tender and she’s tough,” he said on Wednesday. “ I cannot think of anyone better.”
The forthcoming film, currently untitled, is based on Penrose’s 1985 biography of his mother, The Lives of Lee Miller, and is being made by Hopscotch, the production company behind I, Frankenstein, Saving Mr Banks and The Water Diviner. Winslet’s casting was announced on Tuesday.
Born in New York, Miller worked as a model and fashion photographer, before becoming a correspondent for Vogue during the Second World War.
Her work, much of which has recently been put on display at the Imperial War Museum in London, includes striking images of the Blitz and the liberation of Paris.
She also photographed the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, but according to her son, who was speaking at the opening of the Lee Miller: A Woman’s War exhibition, she later cut up the negatives.
“It tells me how traumatised she was and why she didn’t want to discuss it or talk about it,” he told The Guardian.
Miller's most famous photograph is one of herself in Hitler's bath, in 1945.
Realising that she had been billeted in the late German leader's apartments in Munich, she staged a portrait of herself sitting in the bath next to an image of Hitler, with two muddy boots – the pair she wore to Dauchau – staining the mat in front of her.
