Is Lee based on a true story? Here's what we know

If you're looking for some of Kate Winslet's best acting, you should watch her 2023 film, Lee, where she played the legendary journalist and model Lee Miller. The film is not fiction, but based on a real person, born Elizabeth Miller. She became a war correspondent and covered events like the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and more.

The film does not exactly follow all that Miller experienced but it is inspired by her, and is primarily based on the memoir, The Lives of Lee Miller, penned by her son, Antony Penrose. Peaky Blinders' Josh O'Connor played Antony in the film.

What Miller did in real life wasn't easy, but the making of the film wasn't a cakewalk either. It took eight years before it finally came to fruition. At one point, Kate Winslet had to actually pay the cast and the crew from her own pocket due to issues with the film's funding.

It was an interview imagined by Lee Miller's son

Kate Winslet played Lee Miller in the film (Image via RoadsideFlix)

After Lee Miller took her last breath in 1977, Antony found a great deal of material covering her life as a journalist. He found a manuscript called The Siege of St. Malo, as Eli Wizevich notes in one of his stories for Smithsonian magazine.

About that, Penrose said,

"It was this incredibly up-close and personal account of a hideous battle. She’d watched guys that she was joking with a few hours before being mowed down by machine gun fire."

In the film, we see Lee giving an interview, noting her accounts as a war journalist. It is subsequently revealed that Antony imagined all of it in his mind. By that time in the film, Lee is already dead.

Lee Miller began as a New York City fashion model, and a sketch portrait of her appeared on the Vogue cover in March 1927. The film captures this, before moving on to cover more of her eventual life as a war journalist.

The Battle of Saint-Malo was one of the events she covered during World War II, as mentioned in the film. Interestingly, she unintentionally recorded the first ever use of napalm during a war in this coverage.

Some important events Lee Miller covered as a war journalist

Lee Miller fashion shoot feature (Image via Getty)

She initially covered the Nazi bombings of the United Kingdom, which would later be called as The Blitz. This happened between September 7, 1940 to May 11, 1941. During The Blitz, we experienced what we today know as the Second Great Fire of London, which was caused by a large-scale aerial attack in the war.

During the battle of Saint-Malo, she spent five days on the port to cover as much as she could. While journalists are expected to speak and show the truth freely, she was placed under a temporary house arrest after this.

Later, she worked on various assignments with photojournalist David E. Scherman, which also included Nazi concentration camps. Scherman famously captured a photo of her sitting in Hitler's bathtub. What's interesting is that Hitler died the same day.

Lee kept working for Vogue post-war for a couple of years, and contributed stories on fashion and entertainment.