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Two years after its 2023 world premiere, Lee, Kate Winslet’s deeply personal passion project — finally lands on Indian OTT, streaming exclusively on Lionsgate Play. The film may not be new, but its resonance hasn’t dimmed; if anything, time has only sharpened its relevance.
Winslet’s portrayal of Lee Miller, the fashion model turned surrealist muse who reinvented herself as one of World War II’s most audacious frontline correspondents, remains one of her most affecting performances. Lee is less a biopic and more an excavation, a film that strips away mythology to reveal the woman beneath: flawed and defiantly self-made.
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As the world revisits the film, Winslet reflects on why she resisted a cradle-to-grave narrative and instead narrowed the story to the decade that reshaped Miller’s life and legacy. “Lee lived many lives and deciding on the most defining period of her life was the biggest challenge we faced,” she says. “We kept telling ourselves, this cannot fall into the trap of being a biopic. We just weren’t interested in that story structure. Plus, it would have been impossible to tell the cradle-to-grave story of Lee Miller as a feature film, because she reinvented herself so many times across her entire lifetime.
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“For me, focusing the screenplay on a particular decade of Miller’s life was a way to get rid of all the preconceived ideas about Lee Miller as the model and the subject of many male artists’ gaze. We wanted to tell the absolute truth of who Lee was and who she became through her experience of photographing the war, and that began to unfold when we focused on her middle-aged years as a female photographer who worked for magazines and went to the frontline as a war correspondent during World War II — that’s when we felt this would be the specific decade of her life that we wanted to focus on.”
Among the many moments the film revisits, one stands out with unmistakable cultural weight: the photograph of Miller in Hitler’s private bathroom. Winslet understands its historic gravity. “We always knew that we had to have the image of Lee in Hitler’s bathroom in the film. It is iconic,” she says. “Historians have theorised and scrutinised it just as much as we all have over the years, but no one really knows what happened in that room or how that image came to be. With an image like that one, you don’t need to deviate from the facts or the truth — it is what it is.
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“It’s an iconic image, but it took a long time for us to settle on how the moment might have come about, the things that were said, the energy between the two of them, and the technical side of how the images were taken.”
With Lee, Kate Winslet doesn’t just play a historical figure, she restores her. The result is a film that feels intimate, defiant, and deeply necessary, honouring a woman whose legacy has long deserved its rightful light.