Lee Miller and Picasso after the liberation of Paris, by Lee Miller, Paris, France, 1944 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

Lee Miller: The Angel and the Fiend

“I was terribly, terribly pretty. I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside”. This is how Lee Miller described herself in an interview towards the end of her life. ‘A fiend’ she may have been, but the ‘terribly pretty’ was a bit of an understatement; in the 1920s and 30s, she was considered one of the great beauties of  her time. HOT’s Lauris Morgan-Griffiths, a great admirer ever since she first came across Miller’s photographs many years ago, spoke on the phone to her son, Antony Penrose, about a play based on his mother’s  life and work – The Angel and the Fiend – at St Mary in the Castle.

Self portrait, New York Studio, 1932 Lee Miller and Picasso after the liberation of Paris, by Lee Miller, Paris, France, 1944 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

She certainly was an extraordinary woman: a Vogue model; a feminist; learnt photography from Man Ray, together discovering solarisation; exotic lovers – Man Ray being one who was moved to the edge of suicide when she left him; married and  lived in Egypt; reinvented herself as a war photographer in covering London’s Blitz  and was one of the first photographers into the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwal; part of bohemian Paris; married to surrealist Roland Penrose; artists like Picasso, Max Ernst, Miro, Henry Moore visited Roland Penrose and Miller’s home, Farley Farm.

A truly colourful life! And all the information about her could have been lost for ever. Antony Penrose, her son and director of the Lee Miller Archive, knew little of his mother’s work and life until after her death, when a haul of her negatives were found secreted in the attic.

Mother and son had a difficult relationship, but when Anthony went through the found-photographs and pieced together her life – writing a book, The Lives of Lee Miller – something changed. “Through the process, I discovered a mother I hadn’t known. I came to understand, like her and love her.”

Antony Penrose has devised the play, The Angel and the Fiend, based almost entirely on his mother’s and other protagonists’ own words “and what I remember of conversations between them or with me. I’ve invented very little.” It is a dramatic reading, written by Antony and featuring herself and four personalities that threaded through her life. The play is an interaction of both words and images. Eighty per cent of the images are Miller’s, the rest are by David E Scherman, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Antony himself. “It is difficult to describe. I don’t believe there’s anything quite like it. I think the fusion of voices makes it unique”.

He explains, “The only way I could think to portray her life and her connections with other people was to write it in their own words. I didn’t want an actor strutting around portraying Lee Miller. I wanted people to look at her images, the synergy between words and pictures – for people to know that she wrote as vividly as she photographed”.

Cast of The Angel and the Fiend

The Angel and the Fiend was first performed at the J Paul Getty Centre, Los Angeles in 2003 and has been seen in England at the Imperial War Museum North, Brighton, the Victoria and Albert, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and now in Hastings.  The only professional actor is director, David Burrough, who also plays Antony’s father, the surrealist painter, Roland Penrose. The rest of the cast “have been coaxed into their roles”. Lee Miller is played by Ami Bouhassane, Miller’s grand-daughter; Antony Penrose plays himself; Man Ray by James Leighton and  fellow war photographer, David E. Scherman, by Jonathan Bailey.

Lee Miller might have died in 1977, but there are still surprising things that happen from across the years. People often write to Antony saying they have photographs of, or taken by, his mother. One such was of Picasso’s mistress, Dora Maar, painting by a window, but the owner didn’t know where it had been taken. From the background, Antony could see it had been taken at Farley Farm, and the Lee Miller Archive owns the picture Dora Maar would have been painting at the time.

But the thing that has moved him most is the impact her life has had on young women. When he speaks about Lee Miller’s life, he doesn’t hold back. He talks about the fact that she was sexually abused at seven years old by a so-called family friend and, suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome after her war experiences,  alcoholism.

Antony explains that women have told him that when they discovered Lee Miller, it gave them the confidence to pursue their own path and passion. “People have changed from secure jobs like accountancy to pursue their love of photography or writing.” And they have told him their own stories about abuse, saying “ I have never told anyone about this before”.

I ask Antony if he thinks she was a courageous woman. She certainly didn’t seem to be chary of risk or following her passions. Without drawing breath, Antony said “Yes! She definitely had courage. David E Sherman, who worked with her during the war, said Lee Miller was the one person you wanted to be with when you were in difficulty. She never panicked, she always had a plan – and she normally had both whisky and cigarettes.”

Quite an epitaph!

The Angel and the Fiend St Mary in the Castle, 7 Pelham Crescent, TN34 3AF, Hastings for one performance only, 7.30 Friday 26 June. Tickets available on the door or in advance through MusicGlue.com.  

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