{"id":182033,"date":"2025-12-13T15:29:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T15:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/182033\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T15:29:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T15:29:07","slug":"elastic-limbs-fantastical-accents-and-crackling-sexual-chemistry-dick-van-dyke-turns-100-dick-van-dyke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/182033\/","title":{"rendered":"Elastic limbs, fantastical accents and crackling sexual chemistry: Dick Van Dyke turns 100 | Dick Van Dyke"},"content":{"rendered":"

All Hollywood stars grow old and die except perhaps one – Dick Van Dyke – who turns 100 today. The real world Peter Pan who used to trip over the ottoman on The Dick Van Dyke Show is still standing. The man who impersonated a wind-up toy in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hasn\u2019t wound down just yet. He has outlived mentors, co-stars, romantic partners and several studios. He\u2019s even outlived the jokes about his performance in Mary Poppins. These days his mangled cockney accent<\/a> is regarded with more fondness than contempt. It\u2019s seen as one of the great charms of the 1964 classic, along with the carousel chase or the cartoon dancing penguins.<\/p>\n

Accent on the charm \u2026 Dick Van Dyke with Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. Photograph: Donaldson Collection\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Charm is the magic ingredient of every popular entertainer and few have possessed it in such abundance as Van Dyke, the impoverished son of a travelling cookie salesman who dropped out of high school and educated himself at the movies. \u201cHis job in this life is to make a happier world,\u201d his Broadway co-star Chita Rivera once said – and this may explain his stubborn refusal to quit, not while times are tough and he feels that audiences still need cheering up.<\/p>\n

Naturally his workrate has now slowed, but in the past few years he has competed on the TV show The Masked Singer,<\/a> starred in a Coldplay video<\/a> and enthusiastically stumped for Bernie Sanders<\/a>. Van Dyke simply couldn\u2019t understand why America\u2019s older citizens were resistant to Sanders\u2019 democratic socialist domestic policies. He said, \u201cI want to urge my generation to get out and vote for him, please.\u201d<\/p>\n

Too much energy \u2026 Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Photograph: Moviestore\/REX\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

As he nudges into triple figures, he has become a piece of living history: a walking, talking chronicle of US showbusiness itself. Van Dyke began his career performing for the troops in the second world war and proceeded to rub shoulders with the likes of Phil Silvers and Walt Disney. He had one foot in music-hall slapstick and the other in screwball comedy, and possibly splayed fingers in his midwestern hometown of Danville, Illinois.<\/p>\n

In bridging these worlds, he perfected an outward-facing public image that was one part Stan Laurel to two parts Jimmy Stewart: a pratfalling clown who was decent and honest and smarter than he first appeared. And while he was already nearing 40 when The Dick Van Dyke Show and Mary Poppins made him an international star, the actor remained irrepressibly boyish. In 1968\u2019s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang<\/a>, he played Caractacus Potts, the madcap inventor who dreams up a flying car, while Lionel Jeffries – six months younger – played Potts\u2019s addled and eccentric dad.<\/p>\n

Van Dyke, by and large, has steered clear of dark films. He famously turned down the lead role in The Omen and insists that he mostly played a version of himself. \u201cWholesome,\u201d he says. \u201cAn all-round good boy.\u201d That\u2019s true so far as it goes, although it\u2019s probably only half the story, because Van Dyke\u2019s interpretation conveniently sidesteps a 25-year struggle with alcoholism that spanned his professional heyday. Possibly it also glosses over the air of dancing mischief \u2013 even wildness \u2013 that animates his most feted, family-friendly performances.<\/p>\n

Sparring mutual respect \u2026 Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke in The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961). Photograph: CBS Photo Archive\/CBS\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Or to put it more bluntly, Van Dyke may have been mainstream but he never once felt conservative, nor even cosy, exactly. He brought too much energy to the room. It was as though he\u2019d just blown in from outside and wasn\u2019t entirely housetrained. The Dick Van Dyke<\/a> Show \u2013 an otherwise standard 60s family sitcom \u2013 is notable for the crackling sexual chemistry and sparring mutual respect which Van Dyke cooked up with his co-star, Mary Tyler Moore.<\/p>\n

Caractacus Potts, for his part, is the ultimate rackety dad: loving and exciting and liable to forget every birthday and dentist appointment. And then there is Bert, the sweep from Mary Poppins<\/a> who trips across London\u2019s rooftops like an urbanised Puck of Pook\u2019s Hill. The evidence suggests that Bert isn\u2019t cockney at all. He\u2019s a spooky nature spirit, antic and mercurial, who is gamely attempting to pass himself off as a local.<\/p>\n

Campaigning for Bernie Sanders, 2020. Photograph: \u00c9tienne Laurent\/EPA<\/p>\n

Van Dyke is 100 and therefore no longer looks like Peter Pan. He looks, if anything, the platonic ideal of old age, with laughter lines and a thick white beard, the weathered embodiment of a life well lived. In his later years, he has grown used to people asking him for health advice, to the point where he even sat down and listed it all in a book (100 Rules for Living to 100<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The man is too self-aware to present himself as a paragon of good living. Instead he credits his longevity to a sprinkle of everyday magic \u2013 a combination of good genes, solid friendships and a positive mental outlook. \u201cMy life has been a magnificent indulgence,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve been able to do what I love and share it with the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an arrangement that has sustained him for a full century on the planet. It\u2019s fuelled a career so rewarding and fun that it barely felt like work at all. Van Dyke started out as showbusiness\u2019s gawky gatecrasher, a controlled explosion of elastic limbs and rubber-faced double-takes, before maturing by degrees into Hollywood\u2019s twinkling Father Time. He is ancient but evergreen, feted and cherished. And he\u2019s altogether as lucky as lucky can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All Hollywood stars grow old and die except perhaps one – Dick Van Dyke – who turns 100…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-182033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}