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Lee is a new biopic about Lee Miller (1907-1977), an American-born fashion model turned photographer. Miller’s most famous photo was snapped by LIFE photographer Dave Scherman. Miller is naked in a bathtub. As the viewer examines the photo, he comes to realize that there is a portrait of Hitler on the bathtub’s edge, and filthy combat boots and an army jacket over a chair. Along with LIFE magazine’s Margaret Bourke-White, Miller was one of only two credentialed women combat photographers during World War II. The photograph was taken on April 30, 1945, in Hitler’s Munich apartment. Miller had begun the day photographing horrors at the newly liberated Dachau. Also earlier that same day, Hitler had committed suicide.

Multiple-award-winning actress Kate Winslet produced and stars. Winslet had been trying to get the film made for nine years. “It’s hard to get a film made about a woman, and it’s hard to get a film made as a woman,” Winslet says. Alexander Skarsgard plays Roland Penrose, Miller’s lover. Andy Samberg stars as Dave Scherman, Miller’s colleague. Andrea Riseborough is Audrey Withers, Miller’s editor at British Vogue. Josh O’Connor is Antony Penrose, son of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller.

Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer, directs only her second feature film with Lee. Veteran film composer Alexandre Desplat, winner of two Academy Awards, two Golden Globes, and two Grammys, composed the score. Lee’s runtime is 116 minutes. It was released in the US on September 27, 2024.

Rottentomatoes gives Lee a 64% professional reviewer score and a 94% amateur reviewer score. Some reviewers dismiss Lee as a “paint-by-numbers biopic.” Rex Reed is more enthusiastic. “Enough cannot be said about the film or Kate Winslet – irritating, admirable, challenging, sometimes unlikeable, always heroic – as she elevates the complex personality conflicts of Lee Miller into a cohesive, resplendent, three-dimensional whole.”

I loved Lee. I was so intrigued that after the film I read about Lee Miller. What I discovered shocked and disturbed me. Now I want another movie. One that explores the richer, harsher, and ultimately more inspirational story that Lee is too afraid to address. The review, below, will provide a summary of the film. I’ll close with an addendum that clues you in to the more difficult narrative I discovered that the movie refuses to touch.

Lee opens to ominous music and the roar of battle. Lee Miller is running through the streets of Saint Malo, France. Newly arrived Americans are battling German Nazis. There is an explosion; Lee falls. She is alive but, temporarily, can’t see or hear. An American GI guides her to safety.

The scene shifts to Farley farmhouse in England. It is the 1970s. A young man (Josh O’Connor) is interviewing an elderly Lee. Lee is brusque to the young man. He is vulnerable and deferential.

“What do you expect to get from this? They are just pictures,” she says.

“There are stories behind them. They should be heard,” he replies.

“Do you think I went to war just so people would know my name?” she asks. “What do I get in return?” she asks.

“Does it have to be so transactional?” he asks.

“That’s what life is,” she says.

This elderly Lee, drinking and smoking, is a difficult character and hard to like.

She reminisces about her life in France in 1937. Lee narrates, “I was good at drinking, having sex, and taking pictures, and I did all three as much as I could.” She says she grew sick of being the muse, the fashion model, the ingenue. She’d rather take a picture than be one, she says. She left her modeling career and became a professional photographer.

Three couples picnic. The women are bare-breasted, while the men are fully clothed. One of the women is black. A tall, handsome man, Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard), arrives and pours himself a glass of wine. Lee, one of the bare-breasted women, interrogates him. She doesn’t know who he is, she says, but she knows that he is known by the best families in England. She knows this because of his hauteur. She surmises that he is a painter, because he has paint on his hands. Do you keep the paint there, and not wash it off, to convince others, or even yourself, that you are a painter? she asks.

Roland turns the tables and makes a series of bold guesses about Lee. You don’t fit in, he tells her. You are so beautiful that people get distracted just by looking at you. You have secrets you will never share.

They are entranced by each other. They spend the night together. In the morning, Roland, who is indeed a painter, leaves an illustrated note by Lee’s pillow, declaring his love. Roland invites Lee to Paris, asking, when is the last time you spent more than a month in the same place? His question suggests to the viewer that Lee is a woman on the move, and indeed she is, traveling around Europe and North Africa, seeking adventure, art and artists, and fun.

Lee, Roland, and their Bohemian friends, are in a projection room watching a newsreel featuring Hitler. “Not everyone can believe this. Surely they can see what he is,” Lee surmises.

“The only response to tyranny is to paint,” one of the artists declares.

Her friends rise and dance; the menacing newsreel is projected onto their dancing bodies.

“It happened so suddenly,” the older Lee, reminiscing, says. In London, in 1940, Roland and Lee are a couple. Roland grew up in a strict Quaker milieu. He is a pacifist but he wants to participate in the war effort. He is using his artistic skills to design camouflage, including of military installations. Lee is again topless; Roland rubs olive drab paint into her breasts; they kiss.

At the office of London Vogue, editor Audrey Withers and photographer Cecil Beaton are sparring. “Don’t be so territorial,” Beaton snaps to Withers. In Lee, Beaton is depicted as a wasp-tongued, condescending, effeminate gay man.

“You mean editorial,” Audrey replies.

Lee bursts in. Beaton knows her from her days as a model in the United States. “The Lee Miller,” he says, both impressed and yet cutting – as if to say, what is this famous model doing here now? Vogue doesn’t hire old models, Beaton says to Lee.

“I’m not a model any more,” Lee says.

“Oh dear,” he replies, feigning concern. “What exactly are you, then?”

Beaton is dismissed. “I’ll be back to fix this disaster later,” he announces as he flounces out of the room. Older Lee observes, “Cecil could never hide his rage that women get old.”

Lee learns that Vogue is not hiring. Wartime restrictions limit paper usage. “I just want to do my part,” in the war effort she says, plaintively.

Lee does, indeed, do her part. She photographs bombed London buildings and two beautiful young models wearing the sci-fi appearing masks required by those protecting the city from German bombing. “Everyone carried on. I did what I could to capture it,” older Lee remembers.

Lee meets Dave Scherman, a photographer for LIFE magazine. They become colleagues.

As the war intensifies, Dave is allowed access to military sites denied to Lee because she is a woman. Lee makes the best of this, photographing, for example, the interior of the primitive housing for female nurses, and their underwear hanging on a makeshift clothesline against a window. Cecil says that this photo must not appear in Vogue. Audrey champions the clothesline image. “Only a woman could have taken this photo.”

Lee asks “When the time comes,” that is, when the Allies invade the continent, “send me to Europe.”

“It wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t be able to get anything back without military sanction,” and the military will not sanction a female in a combat zone.

Lee is frustrated. Dave is going, she says, and he doesn’t even speak French. She does.

“I was born determined,” the older Lee tells her young interlocutor. We see Lee in France. “I’d never felt so alive,” the older Lee says. “I had to be where the action was.”

A man denies Lee access to a press briefing, again, because she is a woman. Again, she takes advantage of this refusal, and photographs a field hospital. One soldier appears to be entirely bandaged (see here).

“You have beautiful eyes,” Lee tells him.

“My mom’s eyes,” he replies. “Take my picture,” he requests. “You make sure they print that picture,” he says. “Promise.”

Lee photographs the surgical amputation of a shattered leg. The field hospital loses electricity. Lee uses some of her photographic equipment to illuminate an operation. “Even when I wanted to look away, I couldn’t,” older Lee says. She has to look at disturbing events because it is her job to let the folks back home know what is transpiring during the war. “Roland begged me to return,” older Lee says. But Lee moves forward with the troops.

Against the resistance of the military, Lee insists on accompanying troops into combat. Colonel Spencer (James Murray) informs Lee that permission has been granted for her to enter the combat zone. “Write your obituary and send it to your boss. Standard practice.”

We return to the scene that opened the film. Lee is running through active combat in the walled city of Saint Malo. Nearly hit, she is rescued by a black American GI. She finds herself in a cellar. An old woman is accusing a younger one. The younger girl says to Lee, in French, “He wasn’t like the others. He was kind-hearted. He loved me. I wasn’t a collaborator.”

“That’s what they all say,” a GI says scornfully.

Black smoke billows in the distance. Lee photographs it. Her photograph records one of the first uses of napalm. As Antony Penrose would later explain, “Vogue were on the edge of running it, when suddenly all hell broke loose and they [censors] came back and they grabbed the photos, and they put a total absolute embargo on the ones of what we now know to be napalm, because it was still a top secret weapon.”

The napalm encourages some dead-ender German Nazis to surrender. Lee photographs their surrender.

Lee and Dave are in the primitive conditions of a bombed out room. She is typing up a report, trying to make it good and true. Dave tells her “Make it true now; worry about making it good later.” In other words, their first job is to record the truth of the Allies’ advance. This truth will be as rough as their living conditions and as difficult as what they are witnessing. They should not be constrained by pressure to prettify what they see. The finer points of literary excellence and public willingness to see what they have seen can be addressed later.

Fliers drop from a plane. Lee grabs one and reads it. The poem is “Liberty,” written by poet Paul Eluard, one of the Bohemian friends she was shown partying with in France in the 1937 scenes. Lee reads, “On my school notebooks / On my desk and on the trees / On the sands of snow / I write your name … Liberty.” In fact, the Allies did drop these leaflets; see here.

In the street, a mob forms. Girls who fraternized with Nazis are being shaved bald. Lee photographs this. In voiceover, Lee says, “No one can tell you what it feels like. Shame. There are different kinds of wounds. Not just the ones you see.” The viewer realizes that this pronouncement carries much more narrative weight than is immediately apparent.

Roland sends an artwork to Lee. Audrey sends her fresh underwear. Lee violently interrupts an American GI attempting to rape a French girl in an alley. “She should be more grateful,” the GI says.

Lee visits what had once clearly been a luxury apartment. It is now a bombed out relic. There is a Nazi flag on the wall. Lee discovers one of her Bohemian friends from happier days. Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard). Solange is wearing a bedraggled fur coat. She had once been the editor of French Vogue. She is so changed Lee wonders if she is mad. Neither the viewer nor Lee, at this point, is aware that Solange had been in a Nazi concentration camp.

Lee hugs Solange. “You are skin and bones!”

Lee tries to gather accurate information from Solange. Solange says, in an ominous way, “You have to ask these questions because you were not here. So you don’t know.”

Solange attempts to communicate to Lee the horrors of the Nazi occupation. “Everyone is gone. People are put on trains … and they never return. No one knows where they are or what happened to them.”

Lee says to Solange, “I promise I’ll take care of you.”

Solange, with a haunted expression, says, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Lee is drunk. She is with Dave in their billet. “You’re one of the good ones,” she says to Dave.

“What do you mean by that?” he asks.

“Bad things happen to some of us girls,” she says. Again, as with a previous quote, the viewer realizes that this statement is meant to imply much more than its immediate import to this scene. And the viewer realizes that eventually that significance will be made plain.

Lee reunites with more friends. They explain to her that Solange had been imprisoned. “It’s not just Jews,” they explain. “Artists. Communists. Homosexuals. Gypsies. Black people. Anyone with an opinion. Pushed them onto trains. They left and never came back.”

Lee phones Audrey. “Are there any reports of missing people in the news? Thousands and thousands? It’s not over.” Lee isn’t sure what’s happening just yet, but she knows that the Allied advance and expected ultimate victory will not be the conclusion of the war for many.

Roland arrives in France. He begs Lee to “come home. I miss you terribly. Let me take care of you.”

Lee makes unkind comments about his war work “painting sheds.” She is in the thick of it, she implies, unlike him. “People are missing!” she shouts. We, the audience, know what is behind that word “missing” and her rising anxiety, but, the film tells us in scenes like this, Lee does not know. Our anticipation of how she will react once she discovers the truth provides suspense. Also, Lee’s role as one of the witnesses who brought difficult truths to the wider world is emphasized by her lack of full knowledge of Nazi atrocities.

Dave and Lee drive into Germany. In voiceover, older Lee describes their conditions. They went weeks without bathing, or even changing their clothes. Lee takes a pill and drinks. The cinematography becomes bleak, almost black-and-white, almost night. The soundtrack turns ominous. Lee photographs deceased Germans who have committed suicide, including whole families, like the Mayor of Leipzig, his wife and daughter (see here). “There is so much life in a person’s eyes, until the moment when there isn’t,” she says.

Lee and Dave are at a railroad track, near what is now known as the Death Train from Buchenwald (see here). For two weeks, thousands of Buchenwald prisoners were driven around Germany. Thousands died. Covering their noses against the stench and the flies, Lee and Dave photograph the corpses (see here).

Lee and Dave enter Dachau, where they photograph rooms full of naked, skeletal corpses. Bribing a GI guarding a building, Lee and Dave enter Hitler’s Munich apartment. They wash off Dachau’s dirt in Hitler’s bathroom. In her photo of Dave, Lee makes sure to include the shower head hanging over Dave. They dress. Dave breaks down in tears. “Those were my people,” he says. He is Jewish. Lee hugs him and attempts to comfort him.

Vogue declines to publish these photos. Back in London, Lee bursts into the Vogue office. She is enraged. Using scissors, she begins to cut up the negatives of her photos. A secretary stops her. Audrey attempts to soothe her. “These images will disturb people and we need to move on,” Audrey says.

These victims can’t move on, Lee insists.

“I’m trying,” Audrey says.

“Not hard enough,” Lee hisses.

Lee tells Audrey that when she was seven years old, an adult man babysat her, and raped her. Her mother told Lee never to discuss the event with anyone. The world needs to know the truth, Lee insists. About the Holocaust. About bad things that happen and that are covered up.

We are back in the 1970s. Lee looks at the young man interviewing her. “Tell me about your mother,” Lee challenges.

“I spent my entire life,” the young man replies, “thinking that my mere existence was the problem. It took me a long time to realize that it was her. She blamed me for everything that went wrong with her life. That made me feel like I ruined everything for her.”

The woman begins to pull items out of a storage box. “This is a lock of hair from your first haircut. This is the first book I ever read to you. This is the first picture you ever drew. This is the first picture of you and your father.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this? I wish I had known … ”

There is no one there to answer the young man. The elderly woman has disappeared.

We learn that the young man is Antony Penrose, Lee’s and Roland’s son. We also learn that, while Lee was still alive, Antony had no idea of any of this history. Lee was a difficult mother, who suffered from depression and alcoholism. Antony attributes her depression and alcoholism to PTSD from her wartime experiences. After the war, Lee mostly put photography aside, and took up gourmet cookery. Eventually she, on her own, got sober, and Lee and Antony enjoyed some good times before she died, at age 70, of lung cancer, in 1977. The interview occurred only in Antony’s imagination. He never got the chance to discuss his mother’s wartime photography with her while she was alive.

After Lee’s death, Antony became a champion and a curator of Lee’s and his father’s work. He maintains Farley Farm House as a museum, archive, and event venue. It is largely thanks to Antony’s efforts that Lee Miller has been rescued from obscurity. The “interview” dramatized in the film is a cinematic encapsulation of his journey, from combative pain and unhappiness in his relating to his mother, to discovery, to some kind of peace and celebration of her genius.

I loved Lee. I liked its straight-line narrative: first this happened, then this, then this, then this. I liked the plot’s rapid speed. I liked Lee’s rich script full of memorable one-liners like “Make it true now; worry about making it good later.”

Antony Penrose, Lee’s son, said that Kate Winslet’s performance captured his mother to a degree that is uncanny, especially since there is negligible video of her. How did Winslet know gestures and posture, Antony wondered. But she did.

In real life, Antony said, he and his mother “wasted many years fighting.” Once he discovered her wartime work, “I had to understand what it was that I’d missed about this woman I’d held in such low esteem for her whole life.” Antony said that while he was watching the film, “We came to this sequence where she’s sitting here in this room and it was this moment of total cognitive dissonance for me because I was sitting there and I was thinking ‘That’s real. How they hell did they do that?’ It was deeply emotional and I thought that somehow Lee had come back. The gestures, the voice tone, the kind of gravely hit that she puts in that voice it was just so real.”

I wondered how much of Lee was actual history. Much of it was. Research showed me, though, that Lee leaves out significant details. In exploring Lee’s real life further, let’s return to a scene in her biopic. Lee and her Bohemian friends picnic. The women are topless. One of the women is black. Was the black woman ahistorical? Was she tossed in to satisfy Hollywood demands for diversity? Are the women topless because the weather is fine and the sun feels good on their skin? Then why are all the men fully clothed?

The feminist in me recognized that those women, who no doubt voluntarily exposed their breasts, were objectified by the men. The men wanted to look at firm, pretty young breasts. Those breasts entertained them while they smoked, munched on baguettes and cheese, and sipped wine.

Of course, as Bohemians, they believed themselves to be the enlightened ones who had jettisoned oppressive “Bourgeois” or “Christian” standards. I recognized that attitude as self-flattering BS. I thought of the Romantics, for example the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, who, a hundred years before this scene, believed themselves to be the enlightened ones who could practice free love. But they did real damage to real women, as evidenced by a couple of suicides.

The Beat Generation also considered themselves enlightened. According to one scholar, “Beat men of the Fifties urged emancipation from women rather than for them, perceiving them as the embodiment of family and the guardians of sex, domesticators out to trap them into commitments, or sexual adversaries whose powers must be overcome.”

Here are some details that I would have included in a Lee Miller biopic. Lee was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. Her father, Theodore Miller, was an engineer and a descendant of Hessian mercenaries. “The women employees whom he fondled did not complain of harassment, the members of ethnic groups – Italians, Poles, and other minorities, mostly Catholic – did little in the face of the ‘Wasp’ values that kept them from advancing, and the few members of the town’s black community thought themselves lucky to have jobs. Theodore’s strict rule over his five hundred employees was taken for granted.” So writes Carolyn Burke, in her very well-reviewed 2007 University of Chicago Press book, Lee Miller, A Life (available from the publisher here and at Amazon here).

Lee was raped at age 7. The rapist, as far as anyone knows, never experienced any negative consequences for committing this crime. Lee’s parents, in spite of their social clout, did not pursue justice for their daughter.

Lee was infected with gonorrhea and required, in this pre-penicillin era, punishing, invasive, repeated, and imperfect treatments. Burke reports that Lee had gonorrhea “flare-ups” for years afterward. During one such flare-up, Lee confessed in a journal that she felt “sheer hopelessness,” and a “swollen, awkward feeling that has followed me from childhood.” “I was the nearest to suicide I have ever been.”

Theodore, Lee’s father, began to take nude photos of his daughter, photos that would veer into pornography, including lesbian pornography. In one photo snapped shortly after the rape, a little girl, already a rape survivor, still undergoing treatments that attempt to flush gonorrhea microbes from her private parts, has been stood up by her own father, naked, in the snow. There is no redeeming “artistic” quality to this photograph. It is nothing but the photo of a naked, vulnerable, flat-chested, slim-hipped, little girl. Theodore named it “December Morn.” Burke points out that Theodore took the title from “September Morn,” a then-scandalous soft-porn painting of a pretty young naked woman.

Theodore used a stereoscopic device so that he could view his many nude photos of his daughter as if in three-D. In one stereoscopic nude, seen here, Theodore has placed Lee’s hands behind her back. The hands-behind-the-back pose signals helplessness. Later photos, in which Lee and Theodore are both fully clothed adults, are almost as disturbing. In one, the adult Lee sits on her father’s lap.

The young Lee was kicked out of many schools. She left home as a teenager and began a series of affairs with older, powerful men, including Charlie Chaplin, Man Ray, possibly Pablo Picasso, and both of her husbands, Aziz Eloui Bey and Roland Penrose. She also began a series of lives: fashion model, ex-pat Egyptian wife, Bohemian world traveler, party girl, combat photographer, gourmet cook and housewife.

Lee, the film, encourages us to feel uncomplicated admiration. Thus, early on, Winslet has Lee brag about how good she was at sex and drinking alcohol. Wow, she was such a wild child that schools expelled her. Wow, she traveled the world. Wow, she lived in Manhattan, Cairo, Cannes, London. Wow, she had sex with all these famous men.

The rape, the confession of suicidal despair, the alcoholism, the chronic depression, and the photos her father took of her suggest something else, to me. I wrote to Lee Miller biographer Carolyn Burke and asked if Lee was a victim of paternal incest. Burke helpfully wrote back, “Many have concluded that Lee Miller was a victim of father-daughter incest, but there is no proof or anything definite to support this interpretation. After looking into the matter thoroughly, I concluded, as I wrote in my biography of Lee, that while she and her father were unusually, perhaps inappropriately, close, it isn’t likely that their relationship went beyond a deep level of trust, as evidenced in his photos of her.”

I don’t know if Theodore’s violation of Lee crossed the line into physical intimacy. I do know that that level of intimacy is not necessary for a parent to harm a child. Theodore’s photos of Lee document such violation. Lee’s biography suggests harm.

Men and women are different. Women tend to prefer committed relationships with someone they love. Men tend at least to fantasize about multiple partners with whom they have passing connections. Promiscuity in a woman might suggest maladaptation to stressors. Promiscuity in women is correlated with father-daughter incest. See, for example, this scholarly article. “Frequent symptoms of incest victims include depression, self-destructive behaviors, masochistic promiscuity.” An erratic life course is frequently found in survivors of child abuse. The survivor may have unhealed emotional scars that distort her ability to invest in her own life. If these wounds are not addressed, she may succumb to substance abuse, for example, alcoholism.

Bohemian artistic movements announce themselves as liberatory for women. They are, often, rather, focused on satisfying male lust loosed from any conscience imposed by the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Have sex with whomever you want whenever you want and drop that person when lust fades” is not a recipe for female happiness.

The men at that Bohemian picnic welcomed young, pretty women with high, firm, naked breasts. What happened when, inevitably, those breasts swelled with fat or milk and drooped with age? The men dropped those women and went out and got new ones.

Lee and Roland embarked on an “open” relationship. She had other lovers and he did, too. Roland, during sex, liked to tie Lee up. Roland said he liked to “possess his girl in an imperative manner.” Roland tied his first wife to a pine tree. His fellow artist described Roland as a “liberated Englishman freed from the burdens of his puritan past.” Artworks produced by this circle, Burke writes, depicted women’s “submissiveness.”

As time went on, and as Lee drank more and more, she, as her Bohemian companions report, “lost her looks.” Previously, men were blinded by her beauty. LIFE photographer John Phillips called Lee an “American free spirit wrapped in the body of a Greek goddess.” Now, men were blinded by what age inevitably did to her. Dave Scherman, who lived, for a time, in a menage a trois with Lee and Roland, said of post-war Lee, “She is getting old and she is getting fat and she won’t face up to it.” Dave was writing off a woman he once said he “loved.” Once she was no longer a “Greek goddess,” he spoke of her with contempt and a complete lack of comprehension.

Some surmise – and this is only supposition that can never be proven one way or the other – that Lee got pregnant at age 39 with Antony in order to hold on to Roland. Roland, a powerful man, could drop Lee and carry on with his younger lovers, including Diane Deriaz, a trapeze artist nineteen years younger than Lee and twenty-six years younger than Roland. Roland took up with Deriaz at about the same time that Lee got pregnant with his son. Roland had other lovers, as well. He brought them home, to Farley Farm, and Lee had to put up with it. If they asked, he told them that he no longer had intimate relations with Lee. Lee, for her part, told Roland that she permitted his affairs as a way of proving her love for him.

This Bohemian pattern of powerful, older men practicing “free love” as sex with younger and younger women, and those women being harmed thereby, is epitomized in the biography of Pablo Picasso. Picasso is not in the film, although he was a constant in Lee and Roland’s lives. In fact, Lee and Picasso reunited in Paris as she accompanied advancing Allied troops. Lee’s post-liberation Paris reunion with the lesser known Solange d’Ayen appears in the film, but her post-liberation Paris reunion with Picasso is nowhere to be found.

Is that because Picasso is notorious for his serial affairs and his mistreatment of lovers young enough to be his grand daughters? Is it because Roland “permitted” Picasso to have sex with Lee? In one letter, Roland wrote to Picasso, “We sat on the beach with our women, we laughed, we swam in the sea.” “Our women:” both words there inspire rage in my Christian, feminist heart. Women are not interchangeable possessions.

Roland may have been “freed” from the Christian beliefs of his ancestors, but he worshipped Picasso. He gave up painting to write Picasso’s biography. Picasso was “a monster in life, a brutal misogynist and wife-beating womanizer who tormented those around him … His second wife and one of his chief mistresses both committed suicide, his son died of depression-induced alcoholism and his grandson killed himself by drinking bleach. Picasso’s first wife and another mistress suffered nervous breakdowns and went mad. Another lover became a recluse.”

Picasso told one woman, “You imagine people will be interested in you? They won’t ever, really, just for yourself. Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life touched mine so intimately.” That attitude may be another reason Picasso is left out of the movie. Though, for my money, Miller’s work is aesthetically superior and more important than his, Picasso was adept at self-promotion, and he is better known than Lee Miller, who did little to promote her photography after the war, and who has been all but forgotten.

Lee Miller is not the only objectified female body at the picnic where women trade access to their naked breasts for acceptance by powerful men. The black woman in the scene is not there to satisfy current demands for diversity in casts. She was a real human being, and her name was Ady Fidelin. Of the use of Fidelin’s naked black breasts in Man Ray’s photography, Metropolitan Museum of Art scholar Wendy Grossman writes, “is the contradictory manner in which the Black female body was folded into the modernist project as paradoxically ultramodern and ultra- ‘primitive’ and objectified through a male gaze.”

Fidelin, twenty-five years younger than Man Ray, and with nothing like his power, became his lover. Ray wrote to Roland, “She does everything, from shining my shoes and bringing my breakfast to painting in backgrounds in my large canvasses! All to the tune of a beguine or a rhumba.” The much younger woman also kept his spirits up with her youthful optimism.

Ray left Paris for the States to avoid the Nazi occupation. Fidelin stayed behind, protecting his artworks. “She preserved everything, the whole studio,” a Man Ray biographer reports. After the war, “set adrift from the community of creatives that she had been such an integral part of,” Fidelin married a non-artist and lived in public housing. She died more or less forgotten, except for the scholars who have tried to preserve her contribution to the artistic movements of early twentieth-century Paris.

Perhaps not just a championing of misogynist Bohemianism might inspire one to leave out key aspects of Lee’s biography. There’s another possible factor. If a woman has been raped, if an adult is a survivor of child abuse, there is a tendency to regard that person as tainted, as less than. Maybe the filmmakers feared that emphasizing how much Lee survived, well before she ever went to war, would cause audiences to turn away from her.

Antony said of his mother, “Lee never ever spoke about her war experiences so none of us understood what a terrible price that she had paid. Not only the images, the sounds, the smells. It was a deadly corrosive thing that was inside her. I wish we had known. If only we had known we could have understood her better and done more for her. I missed so much of her because she had been so deeply secretive.”

After reading about the woman behind the film, I still love the movie Lee. But I want another movie. I want a movie that depicts a woman who survived betrayal by her parents, who should have protected her. Who survived childhood rape, and near-incest by her father. Who survived being tied up by a lover who wanted to “possess” her, who wanted her to “submit,” who imagined himself “freed” from “Puritanism” and who didn’t love her enough to commit to her, to commit to the transcendent soul of the woman inside the “Greek goddess” body that would inevitably decay. Yes, photographing Dachau, and Vogue rejecting her photos, were traumatic. But Lee’s traumas stretch back much further, to the emergence of humanity itself. Millions of women around the world share the “deadly corrosive thing” “inside” – the wounds that misogyny exacted on their bodies and souls. In spite of everything life threw at her, including the wounds that Kate Winslet chose not to dramatize, and that Lee might not have been aware of herself, Lee Miller survived, thrived, and left us a legacy of irreplaceable art.

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.