Lee, the sweeping new drama from Ellen Kuras, tells the story of a truly extraordinary woman: Lee Miller, the Vogue model and ’20s-era cover star who turned her hand to photography under the guidance of Man Ray, established her own studio, and marched to the front during the Second World War, capturing some of the period’s most enduring images of devastation and survival. Tracking her from her sun-drenched first meeting with her future husband, the painter Roland Penrose, in the late 1930s, to her journey across Europe and her final years, during which she opens up about everything she witnessed and the toll it took on her to her son, Antony, the film only recounts a small slice of Miller’s wild and varied life—yet it still packs a big punch.
As for who plays the legendary photographer, as well as her partner, son, and colleagues and collaborators at British Vogue in the run-up to the war? To celebrate Lee’s arrival in theaters, we compare the formidable cast to their equally impressive real-life counterparts.
Kate Winslet as Lee Miller
The Oscar-winning star of Heavenly Creatures, Sense and Sensibility, Titanic, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Children, The Reader, and Revolutionary Road—who’s also been experiencing a TV renaissance of late, with parts in the likes of Mare of Easttown and The Regime—is now back on the big screen as the trailblazing photographer. Fiercely intelligent and delightfully flinty, her Lee Miller falls for Roland Penrose’s charms and plays his muse but never gives up on her own dreams, badgering her former employers at British Vogue for work behind the camera. Soon, she’s their official war correspondent and on the road with the American armed forces, navigating relentless bombing and documenting the horrors she found at the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, the sheer barbarity of which many across Europe were still refusing to believe.
When we meet her decades later, living in the picturesque Sussex farmhouse Farleys in her 60s, she’s still processing all that she has endured. It is here that she died in 1977, from cancer at the age of 70, with her ashes scattered in the garden. Years later, her son Antony and his wife Suzanna would uncover over 60,000 negatives and prints of her work in the attic, eventually transforming the collection into the official Lee Miller Archives and ensuring that her legacy would be preserved for generations to come.
Alexander Skarsgård as Roland Penrose
In a part originally intended for Winslet’s The Holiday co-star Jude Law, the Emmy-winning Swedish heartthrob, who has received much praise for his performances in Big Little Lies, Succession, The Northman, and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, cuts an alluring and enigmatic figure as Roland Penrose. The British surrealist artist met Miller through his glittering, creative circle of friends, after which the pair fell in love and moved to London, where Penrose volunteered as an air raid warden and taught the art of military camouflage during the war (occasionally using Miller as a model). In the late ’40s, he co-founded London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, organized numerous acclaimed exhibitions, and, in 1966, was knighted for his services to the visual arts. Like Miller, he also died at Farleys, in 1984 at the age of 83.
Josh O’Connor as Antony Penrose
The dashing, Emmy-winning Brit, who has impressed audiences in everything from Challengers to La Chimera since breaking out as The Crown’s brooding young Prince Charles, takes the part of Antony, Miller and Penrose’s only son. Raised at Farleys, where he surrounded by his parents’ illustrious friends, including Picasso, Joan Miró, and Man Ray, he developed an interest in photography and later became a documentarian.
Upon discovering his mother’s work in the attic following her death, he and his wife established the Lee Miller Archives and he penned a number of books, from The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and their Circle at Farley Farm to The Lives of Lee Miller, the biography which forms the basis for Lee. Now, aged 77, he continues to live and work at Farleys—which has been converted into a stunning museum and gallery—striving to honor the memories of his parents alongside his own daughter, Ami Bouhassane.
Andrea Riseborough as Audrey Withers
Recently Oscar nominated for To Leslie, the British actor, also known for her parts in Birdman and Battle of the Sexes, dons sharp suits, a grey wig, and a cut-glass accent to transform into British Vogue’s renowned wartime editor, Audrey Withers. Standing at the magazine’s helm from 1940 to 1960, she wholeheartedly committed herself to the war effort, keeping the Vogue offices open through the Blitz, publishing invaluable government advice, encouraging women to work, commissioning boundary-pushing shoots, and enlisting the help of era-defining talents such as Miller and Cecil Beaton. In Lee, we see her championing Miller’s early work, supporting her decision to go to the front, and pushing to get her photographs in print, even when others deemed them too distressing. After leaving her post, she was made a dame, published an autobiography, and died in 2001, aged 96.
Samuel Barnett as Cecil Beaton
The British actor is hilariously scathing in Lee as Cecil Beaton, the esteemed photographer, painter, and three-time Oscar-winning costume and set designer behind My Fair Lady and Gigi. Before all of that, though, he was a rising star and Vogue staffer, documenting the war alongside Miller with striking shoots such as 1941’s jaw-dropping “Fashion is Indestructible.” He would go on to photograph royals and Hollywood icons, receive a knighthood, and be the subject of a major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery before his death in 1980, at the age of 76.
