The Art of Being Lee Miller

Lee Miller was a photographer, war correspondent, fashion model, art world muse, and an adventurer par excellence. For Kate Winslet, she’s the role of a lifetime.

- By Wendell Steavenson. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz

WITNESS TO WAR – Winslet photographed at Farleys, the historic home of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose in Sussex, stars in the film Lee, expected later this year. Winslet wears a Stella McCartney vest and pants. Paige shirt.

London, one Friday in late June, the scene is a dark, windowless editing suite. Kate Winslet is recording dialogue for Lee, a film she produced and stars in, about the life and work of Lee Miller, the Vogue model turned photographer turned war correspondent who documented the horrors of the concentration camps in the Second World War and was famously photographed in Hitler’s bathtub.

This kind of carefully synced audio work requires precision and practiced technique. “It’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube within a time limit,” explains Winslet, who is fond of a metaphor. “It’s like finding that piece of cloud with the birds for the last corner of the jigsaw puzzle. That kind of satisfaction.”

Winslet is dressed down in a pair of tight jeans and a T-shirt over which tumble several fine gold chain necklaces; her hair is tied back in a workaday ponytail. When I arrive it is midmorning and she has been at it since 8 a.m. and will continue, without a lunch break, until past three in the afternoon. She crouches over the microphone, waggles her hands, focusing on the minute adjustments of tone, inflection, volume, stress, and pitch, fine-tuning individual words to make sure she nails Miller’s midcentury American accent. “I didn’t have enough r on the never. Let’s do it again, please,” she asks the sound technician. “Just one more, a little bit more downplayed…. Can you bring up the level of the