Dick Van Dyke is about to turn 100, and if you think that means he’s winding down, you’ve wildly misread the man. The legendary actor, immortal as Bert from Mary Poppins, the inventor from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the grin that defined an era, is still openly campaigning for new roles. Yes, at 100. Yes, seriously.
While promoting his new book 100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life, Van Dyke revealed the one part he’s still desperate to play: “I always wanted to play ‘Scrooge.’” He says it with complete sincerity, then undercuts it with that trademark sparkle: “I could do it. It’s just November. I’ve still got time.”
Most actors spend their nineties writing memoirs or accepting lifetime achievement awards. Dick Van Dyke is apparently scanning the calendar and checking who’s directing the next Dickens adaptation.
He turns 100 on December 13th, a milestone he treats less like a finish line and more like a particularly glamorous pit stop. He admits he’s learning to “slow down,” in the same way a speeding train “slows down” by going from 300km/h to 280. He still works out. He still dances. He still wakes up ready for the next thing. And if Hollywood puts a script in his hands? He’ll do it.
Van Dyke reflects warmly on the career that made him a household name. Even now, complete strangers approach him not just with admiration but affection, the rare kind that attaches itself not to fame, but to joy. The kind he radiated as Bert, leaping across rooftops with a soot-smudged grin, or singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee” like it was a secret he couldn’t wait to share.
In his book, he writes: “I don’t care how long the memory of me, Dick Van Dyke, lasts in the world after I’m gone… I care about the survival of what I’ve shared with the world, humor, compassion, a zest for living, a love of music.” If children keep singing “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” he says, “the most important part of me will always be alive.”
He refuses to let ageing define him. “Failures and defeats, personal losses… the pains of aging. That stuff is real, but I have not let it define me.” In his centenary year, the rule still stands: forward motion always wins.
And he credits one major force keeping him young, his wife, Arlene Silver, 46 years his junior. “She keeps me young because we sing and we dance, and she just keeps me a teenager.”
At 100 years old, Dick Van Dyke still wants to work, still wants to dance, still wants to play Scrooge, and still believes he has time to do it. If anyone ever embodied the idea that joy is an engine, not a by-product, it’s him.
