In 2023, Dick Van Dyke appeared on the season premiere of The Masked Singer. Hidden inside an ornate gnome costume, the veteran performer sang a rousing version of Louis Armstrong’s “When You’re Smiling” that had the studio audience up on their feet. When he was unmasked later in the episode, the emotional reaction was even stronger.
As the crowd exploded and judge Ken Jeong thanked Van Dyke for inspiring him to get into comedy, Nicole Scherzinger simply burst into tears.
“I love you so much… we love you… The whole world loves you so much,” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe you’re here… I’m trying to play it cool, but you look so gorgeous… You look so handsome.”
Before bursting into a rendition of Mary Poppins classic, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, Van Dyke replied: “Oh, thank you… I’m 97 years old!”
Scherzinger wasn’t exaggerating. Over 60 years since he first shared his dodgy cockney accent with the world as Bert “the chim-er-nee” sweep in Mary Poppins, Van Dyke is more beloved than ever. As he approaches his 100th birthday on December 13, he has become that rare unifying pop figure able to bring together fans from multiple generations and across cultural and political fault lines.
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Every time Van Dyke makes a public statement about the difficulties inherent in nearing a century on Earth, as he did on November 13 when he commented that he has begun to feel “diminished” both “physically and socially”, he is met with an outpouring of support from fans of all ages. This fact seems particularly remarkable given that many of his fans weren’t even born the last time Van Dyke took on a starring role.
Then again, there has always been something timeless about the Missouri-born star. He’s been performing since the 1940s, when he was enrolled in the Special Services entertaining troops during World War II. In his 2011 memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, he recounted how he got a job hosting the Air Force’s daily entertainment radio show Flight Time after an audition that involved reading an announcement to an officer sitting in the next latrine over.
After being discharged in 1946, he found his way to Broadway in time to make his name in the hit musical Bye Bye Birdie right at the start of the 1960s.
To really appreciate the full scope of Van Dyke’s talent, it’s worth going back and watching The Dick Van Dyke Show in full. Yes, it’s in black-and-white, but otherwise the pioneering sitcom that ran from 1961 to 1966 remains thrillingly fresh and reliably hilarious.
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The comedy great Carl Reiner conceived and wrote the semi-autobiographical show about a TV writer, setting it partly at home and partly in the writer’s room of a variety show (decades before 30 Rock would pull off a similar trick).
Reiner actually played the central character in a pilot, but it wasn’t a success until the producer Sheldon Leonard suggested a key change. “You won’t fail,” Reiner recalled the producer telling him. “I’ll get a better actor to play you.”
Van Dyke must have been a dream to build a show around. He could be charming, goofy and endearing all at once, and he had honed his physical comedy in the early years of his career as a mime.
When he’s not cracking jokes, he’s singing, tap dancing or (in the very first episode) making the audience howl with his jelly-limbed impersonation of a man stumbling home drunk from the office Christmas party. He’s like a cartoon character made flesh.
He was in the midst of making The Dick Van Dyke Show when Walt Disney came calling to cast him in Mary Poppins, the perennial favorite that has done more than any other film or television show to endear him to new fans.
“When I met Walt, we hit it right off,” Van Dyke remembered in an interview with ABC News last year. “We both admitted that we just pretended to be grown-up, and that we were still kids.”
Mary Poppins made Van Dyke a huge star, and one suave enough that in 1968, James Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli offered him the opportunity to replace Sean Connery as 007.
Van Dyke, of course, declined, asking Broccoli incredulously: “Have you heard my British accent?”
He did, however, work with Broccoli on an adaptation of a different book by Ian Fleming, portraying the eccentric inventor Caractacus Potts in the beloved children’s musical film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
In the early 1970s, he returned to television with a new sitcom, The New Dick Van Dyke Show, that was unrelated to his earlier series and failed to reach the same heights.
He struggled with alcoholism for years before eventually checking into a hospital for three weeks in 1972. He has been sober ever since.
He remained a TV fixture and decades later, scored another hit with Diagnosis: Murder, starring as a crime-solving doctor in the crime drama from 1993 to 2001. The show was a family affair, with his character’s homicide detective son played by Van Dyke’s real-life son Barry, and several grandchildren also appearing in the series.
Even as he has advanced in years, Van Dyke has continued working and bringing joy to people’s lives in a staggering array of different ways. In 2010, he rapped over a beat by Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith for the children’s album Rhythm Train.
He also had a cameo in the 2018 reboot Mary Poppins Returns, and just last year, at 98, he became the oldest actor ever to win an Emmy for his guest appearance on Days of Our Lives.
That same year, Van Dyke danced for Coldplay in the music video for their single “All My Love”. In the clip, he appears surrounded by his extended family, including the four children he had with his teenage sweetheart Margie Willett, his grandchildren and his wife Arlene Silver.
He met the make-up artist, who is 46 years his junior, at the SAG Awards in 2006 and they married six years later, when he was 86.
In the video, Van Dyke explains why death holds no fear for him. “I’m acutely aware that I, you know, could go any day now, but I don’t know why it doesn’t concern me,” he says. “I’m not afraid of it. I have that feeling, totally against anything intellectual that I’m gonna be alright.”
He has been preparing to be an old man for a long time. Back when he was 38 and making Mary Poppins, Van Dyke donned heavy aging make-up to play the heartless banker Mr Dawes Sr.
It was a role he was desperate to play, and he had to convince Disney that he would be able to pull it off.
In his new book, 100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life, he writes that an “old man” character had become a part of his stage repertoire after he learned to observe and mimic his own grandparents’ stooped walks and old-timey intonations.
Looking back now, he continues, he realizes he’s reached the advanced age he was once just pretending to be. Some of that deterioration, like the stooping and shuffling, he thinks he got spot on. But that’s where the similarities end.
“The superficial stuff, the physical decay, is about the only thing I share with the old guys I played way back when,” he writes. “Thank God, on the inside, I am as different from them as I could get.”
That seems to be the secret that keeps generation after generation falling in love with Dick Van Dyke: He’s the youngest 99-year-old on the planet.