Kate Winslet as Elizabeth “Lee” Miller in the film “Lee.” Photo: Courtesy of TIFF

The biopic Lee, which made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, stars actress Kate Winslet as Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, a famed American fashion model turned World War II correspondent for British Vogue magazine.

Vanity Fair released last week first-look images from the Sky Cinemas film, which was eight years in the making for Winslet. The Oscar-winning actress also co-produced the project, and directing is Ellen Kuras, who was one of the first to introduce Winslet to Miller’s life story.

Winslet and Kuras met on the set of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where the actress served as the movie’s co-lead actor while Kuras was its cinematographer. The screenplay for Lee is based on the memoir, The Lives of Lee Miller, written by the photographer’s son.

The film also stars Andy Samberg as Miller’s close friend and fellow photographer David E. Scherman, and Alexander Skarsgård, who plays Miller’s husband Roland Penrose.

Born in 1907, Miller was an acclaimed model in New York in her 20s. During World War II, she got accredited to become a war correspondent for Vogue in London and traveled throughout Europe to take photographs of the atrocities of the Nazi regime. She captured scenes from the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris, and was among the first photographers to go inside the Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald and Dachau on the day of their liberation to take pictures of the prisoners. She died in 1977.

The opening scene of Lee shows Miller in a combat zone with her camera in hand. In another scene in the film, Winslet and Scherman’s characters enter Adolf Hitler’s abandoned apartment in Munich, where Scherman takes photos of Miller bathing in the Nazi leader’s bathtub — which happened in real life.

Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, visited the film’s set during production and told Vanity Fair he was taken aback by Winslet’s embodiment of his mother. “She was so accurate,” he said. “When I was watching it for the first time, there was a moment when I actually thought that it really was my mom, and I had to sort of take a grip and say, ‘Hey, this is a movie. That’s Kate, that’s not your mom.'”

“Lee continues to be a very contemporary person for me and for many women. A friend of mine said to me the other day, ‘I can’t wait to see the film Lee … because she enabled me to change my life.’ And in that way Lee is a true heroine, by what she did and what she showed people through her photographs, she changed the world,” Kuras added.

Lee is currently seeking distribution.