Kate Winslet thought her Lee biopic back injury was caused by the late WWII hero

Katie Winslet believed her nasty back injury she sustained on the ‘Lee’ set was caused by the late World War II hero.

The 48-year-old actress stars as the model-turned-war photographer Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller - who took images of Nazi concentration camps to showcase the regime’s hidden horrors to the World - and revealed she thought the spirit of the war hero caused her sustain three “massive haematomas” to her spine so that the movie star could truly understand what she went through during the conflict.

Kate is quoted by the Daily Mirror newspaper as saying: “I was really in a lot of pain but then I did think to myself, ‘Well, this is probably Lee. She’s probably doing this to me because she very famously injured her back.

“‘She’s pulling the lever all the time.’ I just thought, ‘Right, ok, she was in pain, I’m in pain … ok let’s go.’
“Sometimes it’s just what you have to do.”

The actress - who stars in the film alongside Josh O’Conner, Alexander Skarsgård, Marion Cotillard and Andy Samberg - took a tumble filming a scene where Lee ran down a street in the French coastal city of Saint Malo while it was being bombed in 1944, and admitted she was concerned her back injury could cause problems to the film’s production.

She continued: “We did war battle scenes and the day before, I slipped.

“I really injured my back very badly and I thought, ‘Oh God, are we in trouble? What are we going to do?’

“So, I just said to myself, ‘I’m going to keep going, it’s going to be fine.’”

While she was willing to put on a brave face, the ‘Titanic’ star conceded she didn’t want to go completely method and copy one of the war hero’s experimental treatments.

She said: “To alleviate the pain at one point in her life, she even got someone to make a bear - a real bear - sit on her back.

“She thought that was going to help. I didn’t do that!”