Actress Kate Winslet stars as Lee Miller in her new film ‘Lee’. Miller was a model turned photographer who took many pictures relating to the life and work of James Joyce Photographer Lee Miller in Adolf Hitler's bathtub in 1945. Photo: David E Scherman A man in Barney Kiernan’s pup in Dublin in 1946.
Photo: Lee Miller Archives Kate Winslet as Lee Miller in 'Lee' Lee Miller talking to art critic Frederick Laws at a play in London in March 1950. Photo: Getty A woman admiring the photographic exhibition titled 'Lee Miller in James Joyce's Dublin' at the James Joyce Centre in 2014 Does Kate Winslet enjoy a pint? Certainly her alter ego, Lee Miller, got the smell of Guinness firmly in her nostrils when she visited Dublin for Vogue magazine in 1946. This remarkable woman, the subject of Winslet’s new film Lee , left behind an archive of photographs inspired by James Joyce’s Dublin, the most notable of them being boys playing near the Martello Tower at Sandycove, where Ulysses opens, and Barney Kiernan’s pub which she immortalised with a photograph of an old man sinking a pint of Guinness.
Her life, up to her arrival in Dublin that year, “reads like an improbable Hollywood plot” said the blurb to an exhibition of her work in the James Joyce Centre some years ago. Originally from upstate New York, Lee Miller was raped as a child. She went on to become a model for Vogue and then a photographer.
She moved to Paris, becoming the lover, muse and assistant to the avant-ga.