Kate Winslet Is Reclaiming Her Image—Just Don’t Call Her Brave

Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them. There is nothing fancy about these antiques, but they enchant her. “It’s the knots and the whorls, the shape and feel,” she says. “They can feel like old friends, and there is something emotionally charging about an old table that comes with a history—I find imagining what that might be enormous fun.”

This hobby has had an unexpected impact on her career choices. In 2015, Winslet’s friends, the owners of an auction house in Cornwall, came across a table from a house that belonged to Annie Penrose. She was the sister of Roland Penrose, who was married for years to Lee Miller, the renowned model turned war photographer who made haunting photos of the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. When it arrived at Winslet’s home, she placed her hands on it and thought of all the people who had sat there. Her mind turned to Miller. And that mind, which had spent decades thinking about people’s stories and how to tell them, became fixated on one nagging question: Why had no one ever made a film about Lee Miller?

Winslet spent the next eight years willing one into existence. The result is Lee, out Sept. 27, which Winslet produced and stars in as its eponymous subject. Lee is not a cradle-to-grave biopic, but instead focuses on Miller’s work during World War II and her evolution as a war photographer, capturing some of history’s most horrifying moments. The film marks a meaningful reunion too: it’s directed by Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer Winslet first collaborated with on one of the actor’s most beloved films, 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

To develop the film, Winslet worked closely with Miller’s son Antony Penrose (played onscreen by Josh O’Connor), whose biography The Lives of Lee Miller serves as the basis for the screenplay. Winslet attributes the long development period to her desire to get Miller’s story right, through “massive” research. She felt the presence of Miller, who died in 1977, throughout the process: “I’m telling you she was behind the scenes pulling the levers the entire damn time.”

Winslet joins a Zoom call in late June from a hotel room in London, filled with energy. She opens by declaring that there’s “literally not a shred of makeup on my face,” though she looks exactly like the Winslet we’ve come to know over 30 years. She speaks in exuberant, run-on paragraphs, cursing up a storm. Though her HBO miniseries The Regime, where she played a lisping dictator, premiered in March, she hasn’t been in front of a camera in a year. Her current gig is “fully supporting” Lee’s release; eventually, she’s scheduled to reunite with her Mildred Pierce director Todd Haynes for a limited series based on Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Trust and star in an A24 drama series for Hulu, The Spot.

But you’d be forgiven for thinking Winslet is constantly working, because in general she has been since the mid-1990s. Her career was launched in large part by Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, followed by Sense and Sensibility and, of course, Titanic.

Lee not only teams her with Kuras as Eternal Sunshine (the surrealist fable about a man who tries to erase the memory of the woman he loved) celebrates its 20th anniversary. It also allows her to explore topics that have preoccupied her in films from Revolutionary Road to Ammonite. Namely, questions of women, their ambitions, and their bodily autonomy.

“Kate is very bold and is someone who, like Lee Miller, looks at the plight of women and cares about what happens,” Kuras says. “Kate is looking behind the scenes, much like Lee Miller looked behind the scenes.”

Winslet was adamant that Miller, who began her career as a model, not be defined by the male gaze. Rather, she wanted to highlight how Miller was a pioneer in a male-dominated space, and how her work turned a lens on injustice. “People still refer to her as the former model and muse of Man Ray,” Winslet says. “That was a minute in her life. I felt very strongly that we needed to take the most important decade that, if she were alive today, would likely have been the one she felt defined her.”

Lee also marked her first time producing a narrative feature. So in addition to figuring out “how the f-ck I was going to play her,” she was also handling the “f-cking cash flow.” She lived with fellow producer Kate Solomon, who took charge when the emotional toll of playing Miller became intense: scenes in concentration camps or Hitler’s apartment, restaging Miller’s famous self-portrait, nude in the genocidal dictator’s bathtub.

Winslet is known for being forthcoming about the pressures of having a female body in Hollywood—in the past she’s discussed the fat-shaming she endured after Titanic launched her to stratospheric fame when she was in her early 20s. But the way she talks about her body and uses it onscreen also signals some of the freedom in Lee. In one scene, Miller rests unabashedly topless with her friends, a picture of prewar bliss. Winslet says she wanted to be the “softest physical version” of herself in the film, but notes that you never see Lee naked in a sexual context. When someone on set told her to suck in her stomach and sit up straight, her reaction was “You think I’m not aware you can see that? I just went, ‘I’m all good.’”

Not that she wants you to call that “brave,” a word that irks her when applied to women who don’t wear makeup or are comfortable in their skin. “That’s not f-cking brave,” she says. “I’m not an ex-postmaster fighting for justice, I’m not in the Ukraine. I’m doing a job that matters to me.” Part of that job means breaking down the lines between cast and crew, which is how Winslet first connected with Kuras on Eternal Sunshine. “She knows everybody’s lines as well as her own, was accessible and kind to the crew, and these are qualities we note as crew people,” Kuras recalls.

In those days, there were even fewer women on sets, so Winslet says it was only natural that she would gravitate toward someone like Kuras, as they were executing director Michel Gondry's experimental, sometimes impromptu ideas—like setting up a bed on a snowy beach in Montauk for the film's most iconic image. Eternal Sunshine's existential exploration of romance is still a touchstone—so much so that Ariana Grande named her most recent album after it. ("I mean, how old must she have been when the movie came out?" Winslet says with bewilderment.) It's also a favorite of O'Connor’s. 

"There's something really special about Eternal Sunshine somehow becoming an inspirational narrative for those young people who are still figuring it all out," Winslet says. 

Kuras and Winslet stayed in touch over the years—they once had an all-star Thanksgiving dinner, Kuras says, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Rebecca Miller, and Brigitte Lacombe. In Lee, Winslet saw an “obvious opportunity” for her friend who had spent her life, like Miller, telling stories visually. “Ellen and I, and anyone growing up in that world, it’s a pretty specific kind of gang you’re in, an exclusive club of hardcore filmmaking survivors of the fittest, you know?” Winslet says. “When you have that in your film DNA, it never leaves you.”

While Winslet has Worked with female filmmakers, including Jane Campion and Nancy Meyers, many of her most famous works have been helmed by men. But she doesn’t believe a male camera sees her any differently than a female one. “I’ve always played women who, hopefully, are real women,” she says. Mostly, she’s just grateful to continue having a voice in her industry—whether she’s pulling together the money for an indie or starring in an HBO hit like Mare of Easttown, for which she won an Emmy.

She describes how she recently showed her 10-year-old son a picture of the small sliver of a house she grew up in. Having a mother who has always, at least to him, been an Oscar-winning movie star, he couldn’t work out what he was looking at or that six people had lived there. The anecdote conveys why she doesn’t take anything for granted. “Getting work and still being invited back to the party is the greatest privilege of my life,” she says. “And it’s not one I take lightly.” Yet levity is one of her undeniable qualities. “She’s like a kind of older sister who is looking out for me and constantly asking how I’m getting on,” says her co-star O’Connor. “She’s in touch with her inner child, and that playfulness makes it really exciting to work with her.”

Case in point: Winslet’s story of how she first became acquainted with Miller’s work. In a famous photograph, Miller’s subject bends forward, her rear end forming an almost abstract shape in the frame. Friends often sent Winslet cards with that very photograph, a winky allusion to her own body. “The number of times I’ve been sent that—specifically that image, assuming that my butt reminds them of that butt,” she laughs, her voice swelling in volume. “I’m very proud. I enjoy that about myself.”