Lee Miller

Lee Miller

Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller, Lady Penrose (23 April 1907 - 21 July 1977) was an American photographer. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907, she was a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris where she became an established fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

Elizabeth Miller was born on April 23, 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her parents were Theodore and Florence Miller (née MacDonald). Her father was of German descent, and her mother a Canadian of Scottish and Irish descent. She had a younger brother named Erik, and older brother named John. Theodore always favored Elizabeth, and he often used her as a model for his amateur photography. When Elizabeth was seven years old, she was raped while staying with a family friend in Brooklyn. Soon after, it was realized that Elizabeth had contracted gonorrhea.

Her father, Theodore Miller, an engineer, inventor and businessman, introduced Lee and her brothers, John and Erik, to photography from an early age. She was his model--with many stereoscopic photographs taken of a teenage Lee in the nude--and he also showed her technical aspects of the art. At age 19 she was stopped from walking in front of a car on a Manhattan street by the founder of Vogue magazine, Condé Nast, thus launching her modeling career when she appeared on the cover of the March 1927 edition in an illustration by George Lepape. For the next two years, she was one of the most sought after models in New York, photographed by the likes of Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, and Nickolas Murray. A photograph of Lee by Steichen was used to advertise a female hygienic product (Kotex) causing a scandal.

In 1929 she traveled to Paris with the intention of apprenticing herself to the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Although, at first, he insisted that he did not take students, Miller soon became his photographic assistant, as well as his lover and muse. While she was in Paris, she began her own photographic studio, often taking over Man Ray's fashion assignments to enable him to concentrate on his painting. In fact, many of the photographs taken during this period and credited to Man Ray were actually taken by Lee. Together with Man Ray, she rediscovered the photographic technique of solarisation. She was an active participant in the surrealist movement, with her witty and humorous images. Amongst her circle of friends were Pablo Picasso, Paul Éluard, and Jean Cocteau. She even appeared as a statue that comes to life in Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930).

After leaving Man Ray and Paris in 1932, she returned to New York and established a portrait and commercial photography studio with her brother Erik as her darkroom assistant. During this year she was included in the Modern European Photography exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. In 1933 Levy gave Miller the only solo exhibition of her life. Among her portrait clients were the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, actresses Lilian Harvey and Gertrude Lawrence, and the African-American cast of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934).

In 1934, she abandoned her studio to marry Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, who had come to New York to buy equipment for the Egyptian Railways. Although she did not work as a professional photographer during this period, the photographs she took while living in Egypt with Bey, including "Portrait of Space", are regarded as some of her most striking surrealist images. By 1937, Lee had grown bored with her life in Cairo and she returned to Paris, where she met her future husband, the British surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose. Her photographs were not included in another exhibition until 1955, when her work was displayed with The Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Miller had separated from Bey and was living in Hampstead, London with Roland when the bombing of the city began. Ignoring pleas from friends and family to return to the US, Miller embarked on a new career in photojournalism as the official war photographer for Vogue documenting the Blitz. Lee was accredited into the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942. She teamed up with the American photographer David E. Scherman, a Life Magazine correspondent on many assignments. Miller travelled to France less than a month after D-Day and recorded the first use of napalm at the siege of St. Malo, the liberation of Paris, the battle for Alsace, and the horror of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. One photograph by Scherman of Miller in the bathtub of Adolf Hitler's house in Munich is one of the most iconic images from the Miller-Scherman partnership.

During this time, Miller photographed dying children in a Vienna Hospital, peasant life in post-war Hungary and finally the execution of Prime Minister Lazlo Bardossy. After the war she continued to work for Vogue for a further two years, covering fashion and celebrities.

After returning to Britain from eastern Europe, Lee started to suffer from severe episodes of clinical depression and what later became known as post-traumatic stress syndrome. She began to drink heavily, and became uncertain about her future. In 1946, she traveled with Roland to the United States where she visited Man Ray in California. After she discovered she was pregnant with her only son, Antony, she divorced Bey and, on May 3, 1947 married Roland. Antony was born in September 1947. In 1949, they bought Farley Farm House in Sussex. During the 1950s and 1960s, Farley Farm became a sort of artistic Mecca for visiting artists such as Picasso, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Jean Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, and Max Ernst. While Miller continued to do the occasional photo shoot for Vogue, she soon discarded the darkroom for the kitchen becoming a successful gourmet cook. She also photographed for biographies Roland wrote about Picasso and Antoni Tapies. However, images from the war, especially the concentration camps, continued to haunt her and she started on what Antony describes as a "downward spiral". Her depression may have been accelerated by her husband's long affair with the trapeze artist Diane Deriaz. Lee rarely talked about her war experiences but it inevitably had harsh effects on her health and her relationship with her family.

Miller died from cancer at Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex in 1977, aged 70. She was cremated, and her ashes spread through her herb garden at Farley Farm House.

Throughout her life, Miller did very little to promote her own photographic work. That Miller's work is known today is mainly due to the efforts of her son, Antony, who has been studying, conserving, and promoting his mother's work since the early 1980s. Her pictures are accessible at the Lee Miller Archive.

In 1985, the first biography of Miller entitled "The Lives of Lee Miller" was written by Antony Penrose. Since then, a number of books, mostly accompanying exhibitions of Miller's photographs, have been written by art historians and writers such as Jane Livingstone, Richard Calvocoressi, and Mark Haworth-Booth. In 2005 her life story was turned into a musical Six Pictures Of Lee Miller with music and lyrics by British composer Jason Carr. It premiered at The Chichester Festival Theatre (also in Sussex). Also in 2005 Carolyn Burke's substantial biography, Lee Miller, A Life, was published in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf and in the U.K. by Bloomsbury. In 2007, Traces of Lee Miller: Echoes from St Malo, an interactive CD and DVD about Miller's war photography in St Malo was released with the support of Hand Productions and Sussex University.

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David Lee Miller

David Lee Miller (born 1951) is a noted scholar of English Renaissance Literature, currently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. His works include The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queen, (Princeton UP, 1988); Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witness (Cornell UP, 2003); three edited books; and about two dozen refereed articles that have appeared in scholarly journals such as Modern Language Quarterly, English Literary History, and Publications of the Modern Language Association. He is one of four general editors of The Collected Works of Edmund Spenser, a new scholarly edition under contract to Oxford University Press.

Miller's scholarly work has been especially devoted to the canon of Edmund Spenser, a contemporary of Shakespeare's whose Faerie Queene is considered one of the two or three greatest epic poems in the language. Spenser was the subject of The Poem's Two Bodies in 1988, and Miller is currently helping to prepare a new scholarly edition of the great English poet. But in many of the articles, and most notably in Dreams of the Burning Child, Miller ranges freely through ancient, early modern, and modern literatures and through both popular and high cultures in order to demonstrate a central thesis: that Western culture is fixated on the sacrifice of sons as a means of shoring up patriarchal authority. The work is theoretically sophisticated, but Miller's playful, engaging style has been praised for avoiding the turgidity and pretentious jargon that have characterized much academic literary criticism in recent decades.

Prior to moving to South Carolina, Miller taught at the University of Alabama from 1978-1994, and at the University of Kentucky from 1994-2004. One of his little known, but important, achievements was his sponsorship of the first Gay Student Union at the University of Alabama in 1983 - a significant act for an untenured professor at a very conservative university.

After growing up in San Diego, California, he was educated at Yale University and the University of California, Irvine. He has won major fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Professor Miller has 3 sons, John Pruett Miller, Truman David Miller, Samuel Boatwright Miller.

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Adam Lee Miller

Adam Lee Miller is one half of the band ADULT. and an owner of Ersatz Audio with his wife Nicola Kuperus. He was formerly in Le Car, which disbanded in 1997. He lives in Detroit.

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Nathan Lee Miller

Nathan Lee Miller (born March 6, 1866, date of death unknown) was the ninth lieutenant governor of Alabama. A democrat, Miller served Governor Thomas Kilby of the same political party, from 1919-1923.

Miller was the Birmingham, Alabama city court's clerk and register from 1888 to 1898. During his time in Birmingham, Miller studied law, passing the bar in 1897. After practicing law for over two decades, Miller was elected the ninth lieutenant governor of Alabama on November 5, 1918. Miller also served the state as Secretary of the Jefferson County Executive Committee, Secretary of the State Democratic Executive Committee, and Secretary of the State Campaign Committee.

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Jonny Lee Miller

Jonathan "Jonny" Lee Miller (born 15 November 1972) is an English actor.

Miller was born in Kingston upon Thames, South West London, England, the son of Anne (née Lee), who worked in theatre production, and Alan Miller, a stage actor and later a stage manager at the BBC. Miller's maternal grandfather was Bernard Lee, famous for playing the character M in the earlier James Bond films. Miller has stated that he has fond memories of being at Television Centre with his sister and watching Top of the Pops and Blue Peter being made. Miller was educated at Tiffin School in Kingston upon Thames where he gained his first acting experience and played in the Tiffin Swing Band. Miller left school at age 17 to pursue his acting career.

After a stint in EastEnders as Jonathan Hewitt, Miller got his big break in the film Hackers (1995), co-starring Angelina Jolie. In 1997, Miller was involved with the creation and operation of Natural Nylon along with friends Jude Law (whom he met in the National Youth Music Theatre), Sadie Frost, Ewan McGregor, Sean Pertwee, Damon Bryant and Bradley Adams. Natural Nylon folded in 2003.

Aside from EastEnders he has appeared on television in the BBC's modernisation of The Canterbury Tales as Artie in The Pardoner's Tale and as Lord Byron in a BBC production about the life of the poet. He worked on the US television series Smith (CBS, Fall 2006). His first appearance on US Television was the 1996 miniseries Dead Man's Walk.

Shortly after Hackers, Miller was cast in Trainspotting (1996), which gained him renown. He was suggested for the role of Sick Boy by Ewan McGregor. The accent he used in the film was so convincing that it led many people to erroneously believe he was Scottish. In 1997, he played Billy Prior in the film adaptation of Pat Barker's World War I novel, Regeneration, and in 2000 he played the role of Cameron Colley in Complicity (video title Retribution), based on the book by Iain Banks. Also in 2000, he appeared as Simon Sheppard in Wes Craven's Dracula 2000.

In 2005, he was considered for the role of James Bond, to replace Pierce Brosnan. The role went to Daniel Craig. The following year, Miller portrayed cyclist Graeme Obree in The Flying Scotsman. In 2007, Miller was selected to play the lead role in a new series for the American network ABC, called Eli Stone; the series was cancelled after a season and a half. The first season had been interrupted by a lengthy writers' strike.

Miller married actress Angelina Jolie on 28 March 1996. They separated three years later and were divorced on 3 February 1999. He began dating actress/model Michele Hicks in 2006. Jonny and Michele married in Malibu in July 2008, at which point she was pregnant with their first child. Buster Timothy Miller was born December 3, 2008 in Los Angeles, weighing in at 9 lbs.

Miller is a supporter of Chelsea FC. He is a marathon runner, often supporting the charity Mencap. He ran the 2008 London Marathon in 3:01:40. Miller was signed up to run the 2006 Marathon des Sables but had to drop out due to contractual obligation to the television series Smith, which was cancelled after three episodes.

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