On the heels of The Dressmaker Kate Winslet has booked another Australian-produced film: a biography of US fashion model, artist and war correspondent Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller.
Hopscotch Features’ Troy Lum and Andrew Mason will produce the film, as yet untitled, after optioning her son Antony Penrose’s biography The Lives of Lee Miller. No director or writer is yet attached.
The US-born Miller found herself at the centre of some of the great events of the 20th Century; a muse and collaborator to famous artists such as Picasso and Man Ray, an acclaimed photojournalist documenting some of the most important moments in history, a witness to wartime atrocities, and one of the most glamorous and desired women of her time.
She died in England in 1977, aged 70. She was the subject of a 1995 documentary Lee Miller: Through the Mirror.
Penrose has been conserving and promoting his mother’s work since the early 1980s. The production has secured exclusive access to the Lee Miller Archives, curated and managed by Penrose, which includes all her photos and diaries.
He has said: "I barely knew that she had been a photographer during her life. She was so secretive about it, and she deliberately hid all of her work in the attic of our old farmhouse. … So it was an absolute bombshell of a surprise after Lee had died that we went into the attic and found all of this incredible work. But I think she made a deliberate decision to bury her career, and this was partly as a result of her war experiences, and partly as a result of her post-traumatic stress."
The Dressmaker opens on October 29. Winslet will next be seen in Danny Boyle’s film Steve Jobs.
Hopscotch Features’ credits include Anne Fontaine’s Adoration, Stuart Beattie's I, Frankenstein, Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks and Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner.