Kate Winslet puts Lee Miller in the frame

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."

- ESTHER ZUCKERMAN

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."