As Hollywood star Kate Winslet grows more producer credentials alongside her starry acting resume, rewriting history from a female perspective has become her mission. Here, Winslet speaks to Vogue Scandinavia on the personal drive behind her latest project Lee – and selecting a Skarsgård to star opposite
It really bothered Kate Winslet how war photographer Lee Miller was remembered. The American photographer and journalist, who was a former Vogue model, captured some of the most heartbreaking and unforgettable moments from the frontlines and the concentration camps of World War II for British Vogue. But according to Winslet, she was remembered for the wrong things. “I was aware that she had been somewhat defined unfairly and incorrectly, I think, historically,” says Winslet, speaking to Vogue Scandinavia at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles following an international press conference. “She was always described as the model, the muse, as the ex-lover of Man Ray, the former Vogue cover girl… This sort of infantilising reductive words that just were so belittling of who she was and what she had achieved and how important the work was that she did.”
Winslet wanted to give Miller a place in the history books that she deserved. She wanted to make a film that was entirely to do with her resilience and her courage and therefore she started the long process of producing Lee – the first film to give the British actress, who has seven Oscar nomination and one win for The Reader from 2008, a real producer credit. It took her nine years. “It mattered to me that people got to see the real Lee and how she lived and what she sacrificed and what she lived through and the scars that she wore from having been witness to those atrocities and the after math of war.”