Lee, the movie
Why didn’t my favorite movie of last year get nominated for an Academy Award?
February 11, 2025
The film Lee, starring Kate Winslet, who also produced what she describes as her “passion project,” was not nominated for any academy awards, a huge oversight in my considered opinion. Based on the book The Lives of Lee Miller by her son Anthony Penrose, her story had largely disappeared from photographic history as she produced little work after World War 2. More than Edward Steichen’s model, Man Ray’s muse and lover, and Picasso’s friend, she was a tremendous artist in her own right. Her story is worth knowing.
The broad outlines: born and raised in the suburbs of New York, she became one of the most acclaimed fashion models of the 1920’s in New York City. Moving to Paris, she apprenticed with Man Ray (developing the Solarization darkroom technique) with whom she had a tempestuous affair. As war descended on Europe in the 1930’s, she became a photojournalist, with David Scherman one of the first to photograph the liberated Dachau concentration camp. In the aftermath of the war, her trauma caused her to descend into alcoholism, leading to a fairly neglectful motherhood.
Her son, Antony Penrose, knew nothing of his mother’s life until after her death, when in cleaning out her house he found boxes of negatives she had shot and stories she had written during the war.
Penrose also published a book of his mother’s photography, much of it from the war, some difficult to see. Another take on a small slice of Miller’s life, her affair with Man Ray, is imagined in the historical novel Age of Light by Whitney Scharer.
Winslet has brought new life to Lee Miller’s story, here she discusses the film with Christine Amanpour on PBS, including some of the background on Miller.
One of Miller’s most iconic images of of her, not by her, sitting in Hitler’s Munich bathtub after coming to the city from Dachau, was featured in a New Yorker article coinciding with the film.
While Winslet received a Golden Globe and AACTA International Awards nomination for best actress, and the film received a nomination from BAFTA for Best British Film, she was snubbed by the Oscars.
To answer the initial question… I don’t know. Perhaps too dark a subject for these times, perhaps misogyny on the part of Academy voters, perhaps too niche of a film, or too small a box office. A shame, as this is a film that needs to be seen, perhaps now more than ever.