For nearly a decade, Peter Sellers strove to get Jerzy Kosinski’s novel filmed with Ashby; the resulting movie―a delicate yet cutting fable of how media intake re-shapes perception―became a final triumph for both. Sellers was Oscar-nominated for his sensitive and contained performance as Chance the gardener, a sheltered TV-raised man ushered into Washington D.C.’s uppermost echelons as “Chauncey Gardiner” via Shirley MacLaine and Oscar-winning Melvyn Douglas.