While critics are divided over whether the film does maximum justice to Miller’s legacy, Winslet – a devoted fan of the woman herself – has already received plenty of praise for her superb performance as the lead character.

But what else do we know about the film’s subject, Lee Miller?

Lee Miller’s background

Elizabeth Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, to Theodore and Florence Miller. According to Vogue, her father was an engineer and amateur photographer who often used his daughter as his subject, which could have sparked her early interest in the art.

While Miller appeared to have a happy childhood on the surface, it was later discovered that she had been molested at age seven by a family member, leaving her traumatised and contracting an STD, per Britannica.

One of the most sought-after models in New York

Despite this, Miller, a rebel at heart who had been expelled from several schools and had to be escorted back to the US from Paris by her father, ended up pursuing a fruitful career in fashion, per Vogue.

Praised for her classic beauty and aura of the modern woman, she appeared on the publication’s cover in 1927. Miller then returned to Paris, where she became a surrealist muse and collaborator of Man Ray, per Art News. They were also lovers for some time and Lee fell into circles that included Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, per the same source.

She travelled the world, from Stockholm to London, for photography and modelling assignments, then married Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934, per Vogue. “We were always off on expeditions into the desert, looking for new oases, for lost villages, for traces of unknown civilisations,” she told the publication. “Of course we never found anything.”

Becoming a war photographer for Vogue

Her romance with Bey was short lived; by 1939, she left him to move to London, where she began a new relationship with surrealist artist Penrose, whom she was married to until she died in 1977, per Art News.

War was declared the same year. Penrose told Vogue, “Lee wasted little time in getting around to Vogue studios and offering her services as a photographer.” The next year, in 1940, the publication hired her and she went on to become a US Army war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications.

Her iconic photo in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub

Miller took written and photographic accounts of her experiences at war, from visiting the American Tent Hospital in France to travelling to Saint Malo where she described how she got “terrifying photographs of the first jelly bombs”, per Vogue.

She didn’t take the famous photograph she’s best known for though, per Art News. On April 30, 1945, Miller and David E. Scherman went to Adolf Hitler’s Munich flat, which had been raided by US soldiers, to take a photograph of Miller in his bathtub. According to History’s Heroes Heard on YouTube, Miller purposefully left the dust of Dachau on her boots to make the bathroom dirty. Coincidentally, they later discovered that Hitler had died by suicide the same day.

She got married and had a son

Miller married Penrose in 1947 and had a son, Antony Penrose. Given the atrocities she had seen during the war, Miller suffered from PTSD and subsequently turned to alcohol, her son told Reuters in an interview.

Yet, being the brave and ever-evolving woman she was, Miller eventually reinvented herself as a gourmet cook, Antony said. “Surrealism hit the kitchen head on. She had these totally outlandish dishes and pleasing her [“crazy artist”] friends was important,” he said. According to Art News, Miller spent the remainder of her life in East Sussex in the English countryside with her husband.

When does the biopic come out?

Miller’s groundbreaking journey from model to one of a few women war photographers deserves the spotlight both on screen and on paper. Her son Antony wrote a biography about his mother entitled The Lives of Lee Miller (1985), which the biopic is adapted from.

Miller’s work is also being shown as art. From November 11 to December 22, Gagosian will host the exhibition “Seeing is Believing” in New York. Sky will bring the wartime film to screens across the UK, though an official date hasn’t been released yet.